Bio
Here’s a brief but more personable introduction than you’ll get from my CV.
I was born and raised in Santa Rosa, California, a medium-sized city about seventy miles north of San Francisco. Santa Rosa was a great place to grow up. For one thing, it is surrounded and infused with extraordinary natural beauty. It lies just on the outskirts of the world famous wine producing region known as the Napa Valley. If you’ve never seen a vineyard in full glory, you’ve missed out! Just to the West are the beautiful coastal drives of Highway 1, and the majestic redwoods of Armstrong Grove. For another, Santa Rosa was home to Charles Schultz, creator of the well loved comic strip “Peanuts”. I spent my early years ice skating at Snoopy’s own ice-skating rink. What could be better than to grow up in Snoopy’s home town?
After graduating from Cardinal Newman High School, I attended the University of Southern California, where I double majored in Classics and Philosophy. There I met Dallas Willard, who quickly became the major influence in shaping my subsequent intellectual and professional life.
While at ‘SC I also met my wife, Nicole, who quickly became the major influence in shaping the rest of my life. Nicole is a classically trained pianist from Vancouver, British Columbia. She has performed since early childhood at numerous venues in North America and Europe.
After earning my BA in the Spring of 1995, I took a year off of school to investigate and apply to various graduate programs. During that year I worked as a Youth Director at First Lutheran Church in Torrance, CA, and as a middle-school teacher at Trinity Lutheran School in Hawthorne, CA. Nicole and I married in the summer of 1996. In September of that year we moved to Scotland so that I could pursue graduate studies in the Divinity Faculty at the University of Edinburgh.
In the Fall of 1997, after earning a Master’s degree in Systematic Theology, we left Edinburgh and returned to Southern California. I returned both to USC and to First Lutheran Church: to the former as a graduate student and teaching assistant; to the latter as a minister to youth grades 5-8. I finished my Ph.D. in Philosophy in the summer of 2001, and then taught at Malone College (Canton, Ohio) from 2001-2007. I have been at VU since the Fall of 2007.
My main philosophical interests include Metaphilosophy, Ancient Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, the Philosophy of Religion, and issues at the intersection of Metaphysics, Epistemology, and the Philosophy of Mind. My main theological interests are in soteriology and theories of the atonement.
Most of my research between 2001 and 2007 was devoted to developing a critical account of the history and nature of Analytic Philosophy, although an article on the ontology of ordinary objects also slipped out during this period. While I cannot promise that this won’t happen again, I am currently trying to focus on writing a book at the intersection of Ancient Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. It is tentatively titled Plato and Personal Freedom: a Preface to Plato’s Political Philosophy (yes, this is an intentional allusion to Havelock’s Preface to Plato).