I am grateful to the other contributors to Vox Nova for this invitation to join their ranks. You have already gotten a glimpse into my thinking with my two guest posts, so I will limit myself here to a few random biographical details to round out the picture. I am a middle-aged college professor of mathematics with wide (shall we say “catholic”?) intellectual interests. With very little effort you can find photos of me that suggest I am an aging hippie. People often look at these and assume I am a liberal, but the truth is much more complicated than that. If pressed I prefer the term “radical” but immediately point out its Latin etymology: “getting to the root.” For the past few years I have been reading a great deal of the neo-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and I have long toyed with anarchism as a political philosophy, tempered by the Christian personalism exemplified by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.
I am married (25 years next year) with three teenage sons. I am a Secular Franciscan and in May I will mark the 20th anniversary of my profession. I served nine years as minister of my local fraternity, stepping down last year. I have been very active for the past six years in the anti-death penalty movement in Connecticut. I am a Mexican-American, born and raised in a blue collar family in a mill town in Wisconsin. I like heavy metal, both Christian and secular, and have a weakness for the hair metal bands of the late 80’s—Stryper rules!
And finally, please bear with me as I figure out how the nuts and bolts of blogging works.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In