Since my youth, I have had a deep love for history and literature. I remember being struck by the beauty of the poetry of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the ninth grade but being embarrassed to admit it. Ninth-grade boys in small-town Indiana didn’t like poetry. I also was so captivated by an excerpt from William Jennings Bryan “Cross of Gold” speech that I read it over and over until I had memorized it.
My love for history and literature remained unfocused until my conversion to Christ at Butler University. At a retreat the speaker read the description of the descent of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21:1-5. I then saw that Christianity was not only true but beautiful as well. My conversion inflamed a passion for truth and beauty expressed in literature and history, but especially in Scripture and theology. Following that passion, I attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and received a Master of Divinity. Added to the love of history, which in some ways is traveling through time to other cultures, was an interest in contemporary cultures. Interest in theology, the Bible and contemporary cultures led to service as a professor in seminaries and Bible colleges in the Caribbean, Portugal and Costa Rica, with significant stints in Russia and India. That travel also led to my marriage to an Anguillian and becoming part of a West Indian family.
Besides picking up a graduate degree in history from Brown University, I received a Ph.D. in theological and religious studies from Drew University. Although most of my course work had been in Medieval and Reformation theology, my dissertation was on G. K. Chesterton, whose flamboyant use of paradox and vivid images fed my love for truth and beauty. I currently teach humanities at a classical Christian school and enjoy the interaction with students as we discuss philosophers, theologians, fiction writers, and movies.
I have been writing blog posts for several years as well as short stories, which are unpublished. The Likeness of Sinful Flesh is my first novel.
