Explore a fascinating spiritual journey with a cultural/social historian

I  earned MA and PhD degrees in US social and cultural history from the University of Rocheste. Although I did some university teaching and revised my doctoral dissertation as a book,  I spent seven rewarding years as associate editor with the Howard Thurman Papers Project, which culminated in a residential fellowship with Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American research and a book co-edited with Walter Earl Fluker. The first two scholarly volumes of Thurman’s collected works, on which I worked, were published in 2009 and 2012.  

Eventually, I found a congenial home in magazine journalism, working as an editor for the Boston Phoenix and later, the Boston Review. Over the years, I’ve published essays, articles, book reviews, and short pieces in both publications. As a result of my adventures, I am conversant in a range of subjects, from American intellectual and religious history, to political and economic analysis, to urbanism, environmental sustainability, and built form: a person of interests. 

As varied as my professional life and publishing record have been, I have been preoccupied with one unifying intellectual theme throughout: that, against American cultural fantasies of inevitable progress and perfectability–right, left, and center, the human condition imposes limits to growth. And so I’m always alive to matters of fitness and appropriateness, of scale and proportion; to mystery and the limits of knowledge; to the danger of monopoly power; and to the propensity to conflict that afflicts the human heart.