toon.jpgWelcome to my Web site. I am an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and currently serve the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Antonio.

Here are few things about me, in brief:

  • I’ve lived in California, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Southern Illinois, Oklahoma, Illinois (again, this time Chicago), and now Texas. Whew.
  • I play guitar, trombone, and I enjoy singing. I don’t do much of any of this in church! (You can thank me later.)
  • I’m a bit of a tech junky (see next item).
  • My first career was in electronic and print publishing: first as a printing press operator, then as a digital technologies writer, then journalist, and finally editor.
  • I’ve been married 21 years (happily to the same woman!) and our son now attends Knox College, where he’s studying neuroscience and jazz.
  • I’m an active pilot and a chaplain with the Civil Air Patrol.

If you really want to know more, read on…

I grew up in Southern California, but after joining the Air Force in 1984 spent twenty-plus years in the Midwest, mostly in Chicago. I was educated at a Christian college, but soon after graduation found myself searching for a community with more religious diversity. I could not accept that only one message contained all the truth or could answer all the questions I had about life’s ultimate questions. My wife, Cindy, and I were also looking for a liberal faith in which to raise our then newborn son, who is now a sophomore at Knox College.

Around 1991 we found a new church home at a Unitarian Universalist church in St. Louis. We found ourselves nourished both intellectually and spiritually, and when we moved to Chicago a few years later, the first thing we did was look up where our next Unitarian Universalist home would be.

Ministry is my second career. Before entering seminary in 2001 I was a writer and editor. The last several years of my career in publishing were spent as the managing editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – a magazine that reports on peace, arms control, human rights, and global security issues. My previous work as a journalist and peace activist continues to inform my ministry. Outside the ministry my interests include playing music, bicycling, flying small airplanes and backpacking.

I hope you’ll join us on Sunday and find what you’re looking for in your spiritual journey. At a Unitarian Universalist church you will find folks who follow Jesus’ teachings, as well as those who find meaning in Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, Earth-centered and other traditions. Many of us find Truth in all these traditions as they speak to and move us. We are also proud to have agnostics and atheists among us, people who believe that living an ethical and true life doesn’t require a certain type of faith. As you can tell, there’s room for a wide variety of belief at our church, including yours!

The inspiration for this site’s title comes from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

A child said, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners,
that we may see and remark, and say “Whose?”

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