I am a Catholic, husband, father, systems engineer, and writer. My writing grows out of my own return to the Catholic faith after years of living largely apart from it, and from an ongoing interest in how the truths of the faith are actually lived in ordinary human life: in families, friendships, work, suffering, failure, repentance, vocation, and the slow work of conversion. My nonfiction writing focuses primarily on Catholic theology, catechesis, apologetics, and the spiritual life. I have written a theological work, God is Love. Love is not God., which is under ecclisial review, exploring charity as the organizing principle of the Christian life and examining ordered love, sin, grace, repentance, Confession, the sacramental life, Christian witness, and the human heart’s capacity both to receive and resist God’s love. I also regularly write and engage with questions of Scripture, Church authority, Catholic moral theology, conversion, ecumenism, and the relationship between doctrine and lived discipleship. Alongside that work, I am developing The Long Way Home, a Catholic middle-grade fiction series centered on ordinary family, school, and friendship life. Rather than using fiction primarily as a vehicle for explicit instruction, I want the characters’ choices and consequences to dramatize realities such as sin, grace, conscience, temptation, repentance, mercy, friendship, family, and ultimately vocation. The faith is therefore woven into the characters’ lives rather than placed alongside the story as a lesson. The larger project follows its characters as they grow, allowing questions of marriage, parenthood, priesthood, religious life, suffering, and death to emerge naturally over the course of their lives. Professionally, I work as a senior systems engineer in aerospace, where much of my work involves systems thinking, architecture, requirements, safety, and tracing complex relationships across a larger whole. That same habit of thought inevitably influences my writing. I tend to approach theology and fiction alike by asking how individual truths, choices, relationships, and consequences fit within the larger structure of a human life.
