About Me & My Story
Meet My Family.
Here’s all of us at my Ordination to the Diaconate two years ago. From the left: Seth, Miriam, Dietrich, me, Will, and Elise.
Miriam
My life partner and love. She’s an enthusiastic choir member and loves creating community.
Miriam is an artist and an independent clothing pattern designer. She runs Birdstalk Patterns from home while keeping our kids learning during the pandemic. A big job!
She partners with me in creating liturgical art,
and she writes at andthentherewasjoy.com
Elise (18)
She’s a senior in high school, trumpet-player, artist, writer, and animal-lover.
Will (13)
He hates photos, but loves mountain biking, gaming (both video and D&D), and friends.
Seth (12)
Our extrovert, Seth loves people, drums, activity, and hugs. He's been enjoying learning some woodworking with me this year.
Dietrich (7)
Trains, trucks, Legos—he loves making things. Also wants to be a farmer, he says lately.
Biography
My father is from NYC (Brooklyn and Queens),
my mother from LA (Palos Verdes).
I’m from all over.
By the time I graduated high school, I had lived in Louisiana, Nebraska, Alaska, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and South Carolina before returning to Arkansas where my wife was born and raised.
We lived there until our early thirties when we moved to southwestern Germany for two years before returning in preparation for seminary in Virginia. I’m currently serving in a parish in West Virginia.
Family and religion.
Fundamentalist Christianity formed my home environment.
We strictly avoided film and popular music, were homeschooled, and were taught conservative values. My extended family included many missionaries, and going out to convert others to the faith was depicted as the highest calling. It was during attendance at our local conservative Christian college that I had my first crisis of faith when a professor of biology casually mentioned being both a Christian and an evolutionist which I had been told were incompatible (yet evolution seemed to make a lot of sense).
My wife came from a similar though slightly less restrictive household attending the same church (EFCA), and we were engaged at 17 and married at 20 with a first child at 23. I served as the usher and a deacon at our church for years, attending every Sunday, without a lot of thought about religion. Over my twenties I gradually shifted into more left-leaning areas of thought as I read the news and experienced the world for myself.
Then in 2006 our second newborn was diagnosed with health concerns and we spent half a year in the hospital with open heart surgery, relapses, and stumped diagnoses. She passed away at seven-months old.
Death and rebirth.
It took time, but Emma’s short life and struggles changed us.
Life and death were no longer abstract; family and purpose mattered more. Eventually I began to want more from the path I was following, and this was accompanied by digging deeper into my church community and Scriptures. I began to sense a call to ministry.
This led to me quitting my job in 2012 and our shift to becoming evangelical missionaries—first traveling around the country raising money, and then moving to Germany to do design work for an international mission agency. We were there 2013-2014 where the second stage of my conversion happened.
Having left familiar moorings, and still deeply engaged in the Bible, I quickly found my understanding of faith and Christianity shifting. During my time in Germany I experienced a full deconversion and reconversion process—rejecting the tradition I had been raised in as unethical, damaging, and at odds with Jesus yet finding new perspectives and compelling alternatives. By the time we returned, broken-yet-healing, I had decided to join the Episcopal Church and seek ordination on the advice of a trusted friend and priest.
A new life.
The journey continues on, losing only to gain.
Two years of discernment and three years of seminary led me to my first clergy position in West Virginia in the spring of 2019. My time here thus far has been a wonderful confirmation of my calling as a parish priest, a time of growth and learning, and a a true blessing of community and support.
First Career Experience.
My university training (2002) was in Digital Media with a focus on Computer Animation and a minor in Illustration.
I worked as a full-time Instructor in Animation at the university the year after graduation before forming a business partnership and producing an animated short for a division of Hallmark in 2005. I continued teaching as an adjunct in design for many years after.
I migrated into website design, merging technology, communications, and psychology into media.
Until entering seminary, I worked in cycles between my own freelance businesses and as an employee for media firms. This included:
Designing and overseeing the development of an online store platform that went on to run millions in sales for a venture-capital-funded startup.
Revitalizing, strategizing, and running the branding and messaging of a large international non-profit as Creative Director.
Founding a retail business with my wife, with a brick-and-mortar shop I designed and renovated personally combined with an online store, which we later sold.
Led design teams in research, visioning, and strategy, creating effective and lauded software solutions for large corporations.
I was good at this work, but my values and what my effort produced were increasingly at odds.
The last two projects I worked on before leaving for seminary were for large corporations:
My business partner and I pitched, won, and developed a custom B2B software interface for a large poultry processing firm. The result has been praised as better than any competing product or offering, yet it serves an industry with troubling ethical foundations and labor problems.
I was hired as a consultant to assist on several internal applications for an extremely large retailer. I was able to locate key needs, revise strategy, and quickly lead the team into a new and successful direction—yet the function of the software was deliberately and overtly anti-competitive, resulting in harm to workers and communities.
This tension between vocation and employment was part of what led me to the priesthood.
Knowing that many face a similar challenge in providing for themselves and families also supports my activism in rethinking our shared national values and economic structures.
I continued some design work through seminary and I put it to use in my ministry today, but with different ends in mind.
Hobbies and Activities.
In addition to art and reading, I enjoy a variety of hobbies.
Following are some photos of boat-building, woodworking, construction/renovation, cycling, and hiking activities. Unpictured: building 2000+ piece jigsaw puzzles.
