About Me

I am a retired Friends/Quaker minister. Since my calling in 1968, my ministry has found its channels in pastoral ministry, peace education, teaching, and research-based writing. This website features my published work from over the years. Because Friends emphasize a faith based upon experience, our theology is mostly in narrative form: autobiographies, spiritual journals, and histories. My work in Quaker theology has thus been mainly historical theology — tracing the developments among seventeenth-century and twentieth-century Friends in relation to the wider social and historical currents around them. Conversely, my work has contemplated a theology of history, a sense that divine purposes work through these Spirit-led movements, however incomplete and flawed our human understandings and intentions may be.

Since retirement from work with Quaker organizations, my theological writing has become more post-Quaker. I continue to to be active in the Religious Society of Friends. But I am interested in how I can apply what I have learned from Quaker history and theology to wider currents around me. In particular, I am interested in the various commoning/commonist movements today that seek to define and protect various natural and cultural resources as a common heritage among all the species of life on earth. I believe that the early Christian and early Quaker movements had strong commoning impulses that only over time became bracketed as “religious.” This new work began to emerge in my memoir, Life in Gospel-Space: A Testimony (2020) It has developed further with Into the Common: a Journal in Eighteen Essays (2021).