I grew up in rural Chester County, Pennsylvania. After graduating from high school in West Chester, PA, my family moved to Texas, where I earned degrees from Abilene Christian College and Hardin-Simmons University. I live in Abilene, Texas, where I taught English, full-time, at Hardin-Simmons from 1988 until 2019. Previous to HSU, I taught at Northwestern College (Orange City, IA) and Texas A&M University, where I wrote my PhD dissertation on Milton’s Paradise Lost. My primary research interests include Milton, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Walker Percy. I have read over sixty papers at scholarly conferences and published far fewer academic articles. While at HSU, I developed three catalog courses: Studies in Milton, The Thought and Fiction of C.S. Lewis, and Modern Fantasy. My long-term involvement with photography resulted in the publication of a pictorial biography–with Rolland Hein of Wheaton College–George MacDonald: Images of His World. I also shot the illustrations for The Armstrong Browning Library, for Baylor University, and produced the portraits for They Remember: Recollections of Members of the Carver Community of Abilene Texas.
After taking workshops with Peter Turnley in Paris and New York, I developed and taught a street photography course for the Hardin-Simmons University art department. I continue to teach an Honors seminar at HSU called “Discourse in Aesthetics.”
Cathy and I are celebrating forty-seven years of marriage this year; we have three children and four grandchildren. (May 2020)