Bio:

A newspaper and magazine reporter in my first career, my essays and poetry have appeared in Belt Magazine, Bearings Online, GEEZ magazine, The Christian Century, and Spirituality & Health. I am also the author of Loving What Doesn’t Last, published in October 2021.

The proud pastor of a brief but exciting experiment in new faith community on the East Side of Cleveland, I’m part of the weird, wacky and often rhythmically challenged but lovable United Church of Christ. I most recently served a fun church in the Shakespearean Center of Southern Oregon. Opinions expressed here are my own.

I grew up on a hill in the middle of nowhere Northeast Ohio.

My words feel forged there, watching styrofoam cups melt at night in a burn barrel on a back 40 I imagine defending with a shotgun and my miniature Doberman pinscher.

(Disclaimers: It was the ’80s. We didn’t know any better than to burn styrofoam. It was more like an acre and a half, and my dog’s bark was much bigger than his bite.)

From that little piece of Appalachia, I’ve transplanted several times: Minneapolis, Cleveland, and now non metropolitan but magical Southern Oregon.

A writer, editor, and refugee of the Fourth Estate, I am also an ordained pastor puttering in the spiritual R&D department of wherever Jesus is taking us next.

My best guess? It won’t be so much in the “thin places,” but the thick ones, those dense moments of human existence that feel like banging your forehead against concrete block, where the chasm between what is and what should be gapes, as impossible to traverse as the canyon between Lazarus and Dives.

What I look for is Love showing up with skin on. Right here.