About Me

I’m a university professor who lives each day as a reader, a writer, a speaker, and a companion. This means I am a lover of words, especially those that gather us and bear the capacity to change us.

Words are living things—little creatures that bless or curse, heal or kill. Some words open us up. Others close us off. Some fence us in. Others set us free.

I write and speak as one who has been both caged and liberated by language. I hold an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School (’96), a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen (’05), and I’ve spend most of my adult life at Seattle Pacific University, where I now serve as Professor of New Testament Studies.

Despite my credentials I have always been a pastor at heart, and after a close encounter with suffering and death, I’ve become convinced that life is short, and that God doesn’t really need another Bible scholar writing for a select few. God needs open-hearted partners to join the far harder work of accompaniment, of being with.

For me, being with is the calling laid upon us all to help each other survive—the call to link hands so we can make it through whatever assails us with our integrity and love intact. In all sorts of ways, the words I write are a reaching out the hand to see if anyone clasps back.

If you’d like to join hands with me, consider signing up for my bi-weekly newsletter on Substack, Beyond the Shallows, where I write about Scripture as a living word that calls us into deeper waters, creatureliness as the condition we’re called to inhabit, not deny or escape, and the surprising discovery of God’s presence in the unfathomable places where we feel the most lost.