About Me

I have been a scholar, a teacher, and a writer. I studied theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and I received a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of California at Irvine. Along the way I have had two professors who have deeply influenced me in the practice of dialogical reading: Otto Michel (1903-1993), Professor on the Evangelisch-theologische Fakultät and founder of the Institutum Judaicum at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen, Germany, taught me to read the texts of the Johannine tradition in dialogical interaction with its Hebraic substrate, the Hebrew Bible; and Allan W. Anderson (1922-2013), Professor of Religion at San Diego State University, taught me to read the Bible in dialogical interaction with the Hindu scriptures.

I taught Humanities and Writing at the University of California for fifteen years, followed by twenty years at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Washington, teaching Humanities, specializing in World Religions and Cross-Cultural Studies.

On October 14, 2012, when I participated in a discussion of I and Thou, it became my call to engage with it more deeply and to turn to engage with Martin Buber. For me, the text, the voice, and the person stand together as one in witness to dialogue, to encounter with others and with the eternal Thou.

For seven years I studied the writings, the thought, the life, and the times of Martin Buber. I retranslated much of I and Thou from the original German, read widely in Buber’s work, and began to piece together how his life was his dialogue with his cultural contexts.

My writings during this period turned into a book, Turning to the Other: Martin Buber’s Call to Dialogue in I and Thou. It was published by Wipf and Stock on September 2, 2020.

For the past several years I have been an active hiker in the Pacific Northwest. I have focused on the trails, the geology, and the flora of Mount Rainier, the great gem of the Cascade Range, the home to several life zones, and the most glaciated peak in the U.S. south of Alaska.