About

Photo by Jill Johnson
I am a progressive Presbyterian minister who moonlights as a provider of left-leaning, spiritually-grounded social and political commentary. My writing has appeared in a wide variety of print, boradcast and online media. I am a regular participant in the Perspective Program on KQED FM San Francisco, the nation’s largest NPR affiliate. My op-ed writing has been published by the San Jose Mercury News, and for three years I wrote a weekly and occasionally syndiated column for UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum.  My feature length writing has appeared on Beliefnet.com, the largest religion and spirituality presence on the web, and on TheRevealer.org, a publication of the New York University School of Journalism’s Center for Religion and the Media. My writings have been linked by the BBC Online, Al-Jazeera’s English language webpage, and the webpage of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Journal of Higher Education gave my writing high marks; the reviewed article was later assigned as required reading in a political science course at Notre Dame University. Currently, I am working on a book about the Church’s response to undocumented immigration, which will be published by Westminster John Knox Press in the Fall of 2010.

My blog has been footnoted by Wikipedia and in Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

I am a graduate of Westmont College, where I majored in religious studies, with an emphasis in Urban Ministry, and of Princeton Theological Seminary, where I earned a Master of Divinity with a focus on systematic theology.

I am married to Anne Marie and together we have three children, Mimi, Nellie and William, and a foster daughter from Burma named Kate.