The Return

This blog fell apart as soon as it began.  

I created the website when a clergy friend of mine, who had been discussing my work with a colleague, asked me if I had a website to which he could refer people.  I had never considered the possibility before and figured it could be an interesting project.   

The blog began at a time when things felt like they were coming together professionally:  I was midway through my doctoral work; I was regularly presenting my work in conferences and getting published.  I figured it could be a way to connect people to professional updates, and to provide a platform for occasional reflections that were more accessible than my academic writings.  

Then Covid happened.  

I don’t need to detail much of my experience during that time.  God knows we all have some amount of trauma from those years.  

In addition to all the stress and isolation, I began to experience a vocational and religious crisis.  The God I had devoted my life to studying had turned into an empty and irrelevant abstraction.  After feeling disconnected from my Unitarian ecclesial context, I made the decision to leave the movement all together.  I increasingly doubted my future in the academy.  In light of this, I doubted the value of my scholarship and of the discipline of theology in general.  

So I disappeared.  I took some time off, left Boston, and left the academy behind, unsure if I would actually come back.  I welcomed my son into the world.  I worked a normal job.  I tried to rebuild my life.  The biggest surprise, I returned to Christianity, the tradition that I had been raised in, and whose intellectual traditions I had spent the past several years of my life studying.  

I am now slowly returning to the academy.  This summer I delivered my first conference paper in more than two years, at the annual meeting of the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought.  I officially resumed my program at Boston University, but from the comforts of my Minnesota home, and I have undertaken my first major writing project since 2020.  

Today I decided to resurrect this website.  I’m not sure where my journey is headed, but I know that my life-long quest for ultimacy is not over.  I am looking forward to continuing to develop my vocation as a theologian and philosopher of religion and figuring out how I can use that vocation to serve the church in and out of the academy.  

Thank you, dear readers, for your time.