About Me

I am a lay theologian, an Anglican living in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, and am presently of dubious ecclesiastical identity.

I was raised in a blue collar Southern Baptist family, asked Jesus to “come into my heart” at the age of five, was baptized at the age of seven and received what I believed to be a call to ordained ministry when I was sixteen. I discovered the writings of the Inklings and their circle (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Charles Williams, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers) when I was a teenager.

I majored in philosophy at an Evangelical liberal arts college in Denver, Colorado, where I was introduced to the classical Western tradition in theology (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) and mid-twentieth century critical orthodoxy in the writings of Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg and the biblical theology movement.

I left the Baptists during my senior year in college and began searching for the Church. I studied for a Master’s degree at a Roman Catholic Seminary where they read people like Karl Rahner. During this period, I became interested in the relation between Medieval and Reformation Christianity. At the end of that time, I became an Episcopalian, thinking I had joined the Catholic Church reformed of the aberrations of late Medieval and Tridentine Catholicism. There were then a lot of us “Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail.” At that time, it would have been beyond my wildest dreams (or fears) that within a generation the Episcopal Church would embrace high-church Unitarianism. I greatly admired William Frey, the local Episcopal bishop, who combined orthodox Anglicanism with a social conscience. Frey had been forced out of Guatemala at gunpoint for criticizing the local regime’s violations of human rights. Shortly after he confirmed me, Frey became Dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry.

After my confirmation as an Episcopalian, I moved to South Bend, Indiana where I studied for a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame. While there, I attended the local Episcopal Cathedral. The Roman Catholic liturgy students jested that they would visit us from time to time to see what liturgy was like before Vatican II. At the end of my time at Notre Dame, I decided to write my dissertation on Jacobus Arminius.

I moved to Boston, MA, to write my dissertation, where I found work in academic administration at Harvard University. This enabled me to use Harvard’s library facilities to do research, as Notre Dame did not have the original sources in Protestant theology. Harvard did. One of the thrills of working at Harvard was poring over the 400-year-old books that I needed in Houghton Library. I spent many lunch hours in the stacks of the Divinity School library, where I could find copies of almost any theology text I needed.

Five years after I finished writing my dissertation, having failed to receive so much as an interview for a permanent teaching position, I came to the conclusion that there was no point to staying in the Boston area, applying for teaching positions each fall, hoping that one day I might become a theology professor. When my wife Jennie and I had married (oh, yes, I got married while I was in Boston as well as wrote a dissertation), we had decided that when I finished my dissertation, she could pursue her lifelong dream of attending art school, and learning to paint. We moved to Connecticut, where she studied at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, one of the few places in the country that still teaches traditional realistic painting and sculpture. She painted the portrait of me at the top of the page.

While Jennie studied painting (I got used to living in an apartment stuffed with canvases in various stages of completion), I did a number of things to put food on the table. I taught for a year at Trinity College, Hartford. (I have also taught at the University of Notre Dame, Harvard University, and Assumption College. That, and three bucks, will get me a latte at Starbucks.) I did academic administration for a year at Wesleyan College. After that, I did IT support, web application programming and database programming.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day 2005, my father suffered a severe stroke, and I spent much of the next year alternating between helping my mother care for my father in Arizona, and being with Jennie in Connecticut. My father died of an unexpected heart attack last January. A couple of months later I was interviewed and hired for a teaching position at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA. (Yes, the same Trinity where Bishop Frey was Dean for awhile.) Jennie and I have lived in Ambridge since late August 2007. I am currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Historical Theology, and loving every minute of it. My dad would have been thrilled.