The author came to faith while a couple years into study for a PhD in mathematics, formal logic the track.

Growing up with all the service orientation and freedom afforded by believing parents, father a part-time ordained clergyman (Episcopal), mother a rebel in her own right as far as growing up an Evangelical, in contrast to the more traditional faith of her upbringing, and both parents raised in Navy families (fathers a chaplain and an engineer, captain, respectively). The author lived into all the liberal thought of the incarnational theology of the latter half of the last century: parents were in a mission field called the “inner city”, and the author attended public schools throughout, often in the minority as a white person.

Moving ahead, the author is ever grateful for the work ethic afforded both by parents and by hard-working childhood friends; as the later named dot-com era began, he dropped out of Boston Latin School in eleventh grade and became a full-time software engineer. Moving along, college two years later was initially disenchanting, but later his pursuit of a BA in philosophy led to mathematics, formal logic, alongside deep existential questions bandied about, and induction into literature alongside philosophy. It was a classic education, of which the author has become a staunch advocate and, hopefully, test case.

Conversion was a matter of reaching a certain fought-over point career-wise, finally admitted and attending his first choice of PhD program (Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh), and reckoning with a question that had given him pause from the time of programming computers as a teenager: what to make of the economic and racial disparities of youth? How to explain the teenage rebellion against parents, and unsavory habits indulged therein? Yet throughout all experimentation, what later came to be appreciated as friendships, were formed, and something important was seen.

Loving math but convicted, the author nonetheless went to study for the ministry at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry for one non-degree year. Sent forth from said seminary, with a deep sense of life experience, relevance, calling, and ministry, he battled many questions initially until finally learning to find his own voice as a writer on theological topics. This was unforeseen as a calling, but at present the author is writing daily, and building up followers through online media, Facebook being the primary vehicle for several years worth of meditation writing.

The sending mandate at seminary was to go back to the basics; these have afforded personal conviction alongside an early training in rejecting any ministry of “Law” (endemic to a church culture that the author did not yet fully know) and push for a right understanding of “Grace”. The author came with a deep sense of debt, and though his act was in many ways “cleaned up” in graduate school (and as a teenage programmer), he found affinity on church peripheries: addiction theology, basic reconciliation with parents and friends, repentance leading unto faith. Hopefully, this blog is relevant; hopefully it is inspiring to others who may not yet know the church, alongside those long familiar with its halls and sanctuaries.