About the Author

I’m a business guy who became a writer after I retired. I spent a career in banking and management consulting, and I still do some consulting with small to mid-sized companies. But I spend most of my time now writing, lecturing at local universities, teaching at my church, and serving on the board of two nonprofits.

In college and grad school my heart and sights became fixed on the big questions of life. I became infected with what G. K. Chesterton described as education not as a subject or series of subjects but as a “transfer of a way of life.” This fixation led me to a life of philosophical reflection, literary and artistic wonder, and religious affection—in my case, my deeply held Christian faith. It never went away while I pursued my business career. I’ve tried to live in the practical work-a-day world of business while pursuing what Dr. Louise Cowan called life shaped by the “poetic imagination.” The modern world tends to separate the pragmatic worlds of politics, economics, and commerce and the worlds of ideas, history, literature, poetry, and the arts. It often treats them as parallel worlds that don’t touch. But they do and are integral. We are shaped by the prevailing myths and big ideas that we live in at any given time and that are communicated through the images, sacred stories, and practices we partake of—this is what philosopher James K. A. Smith calls our “cultural liturgies.” Habits of the Heart is a standalone story but is also a narrative picture of how this shaping force occurs in the life of Claude Howell.

Habits is my second book and my first foray into the world of historical fiction. My first book, Rediscovering God’s Grand Story: In a Fragmented world of Pieces and Parts (Wipf & Stock, 2017), was more philosophical and explicitly religious.