So it has been natural that my adult life has also been shaped by words. From working in a rare book library to being marketing director of a small press to managing the trade book department at a university-town bookstore, I have seen most sides of the book trade. These are all detailed on my resume. As a volunteer, I became a literacy tutor and trainer for LaubachLiterary Action. 

While dealing with bound words at work, at home I was trying my hand at writing my own. The nonsense poetry I wrote with my best friend, Celeste, had a kind of cult following in High School. I don't think my creative writing professor was too impressed in college, but I pressed on, and after graduation I began to have greater success with dramatic writing. I wrote and produced skits, full-length musical plays, and a multitude of puppet shows, first for my church and then as part of the Mostly Madness Entertainment Company.

I was raised in equal measure by my parents and J.R.R.Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy has formed me in ways that I am still learning. My love of Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, and other fantasy led me to my first publication, as I wrote about the way fantasy had shaped my life for CHRISTIAN HERALD magazine. In the meantime, I was writing my own fantasy novel, which after several rewrites, is at last ready for a published home. For more information on THE USHER, go to 'My Work' in the menu to the left.

After thirty years of reading and writing words, I finally followed a childhood calling to enter the ordained ministry and preach the Word. Read about my callto ministry here, and my strugglewith women in the pulpit here. In weekly preaching, my sermon skills were honed so that in 2000 I received the Wilbur C. Ziegler Award for Excellence in Preaching from the NewEngland Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Readit or hear it in Real Audio here. From that came other opportunities for the publication of my sermons.

At about the same time, I was accepted into the Pastor-Theologian program out of the Centerof Theological Inquiry in Princeton. This honor opened doors to have my voice heard on theological matters and gave rise to a book that had been forming in my mind for some time, Blowing The Lid Off The God-Box.

With that book published in April, 2005 and the next one, God's Top 10: Blowing the Lid Off the Commandments published in October, 2006, it has been an exciting ride.