Contributors
George Aldhizer
George is from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, currently a graduate student in accounting at Wake Forest University. He is excited about living and thinking through the implications of Abraham Kuyper’s exclamation, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
Christian Background: George was born into an Evangelical Methodist home, learning the importance of living all of life in light of the gospel. He currently attends a Presbyterian church (PCA) in Winston-Salem, excited about its worship, liturgy, and use of the Scriptures that longs to see Christ exalted in all things.
Cameron Brooks
Cameron is currently a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary working toward an M.A. in Theological Studies. He previously obtained a B.A. from the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota, majoring in theology/philosophy and English. He is especially interested in Christian theological ethics. Cameron lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife Jenny.
Christian Background: Cameron was raised in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) and grew up reading the Bible and believing in the Christian God. However, it wasn’t until high school that he came to trust in Jesus as Lord and Savior. Since then, Cameron has been involved in several evangelical churches, including a Sovereign Grace church plant (Emmaus Road Church, Sioux Falls, SD) and Acts 29. He loves writing and reading theology, among other genres. A few of his favorite thinkers are St. Augustine of Hippo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oliver O’Donovan, and Timothy Keller.
Larry Brown
Larry J. Brown, Jr. was born & raised in the city of Jacksonville, Florida. He is currently a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at Howard University. Larry is a graduate of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity (2015) and holds a BA in English Literature & Psychology from Florida International University (2012). He is an avid gamer, anime fan, and enjoys exploring life, God, and everything in between. Larry is an ordained Baptist minister.
Christian Background: Larry was born and cradled in the Baptist Church. He now aligns with a strong liberation and prophetic traditions of the Black Baptist Church. Taking science, history, and philosophy seriously in conversation with the biblical text, Larry primarily engages in existential and liberation approaches with streaks of process thought.
Creighton Coleman
Creighton is a Wichita native currently pursuing an M.A. in Theological Studies at Saint Louis University (SLU). Prior to SLU, Creighton completed a B.A. in Political Science at Wichita State University (2012) as well as an M.A. in Christian Apologetics from Biola University (2013), in the Los Angeles area. He enjoys sports, trying new food, and re-watching The West Wing.
Christian Background: Creighton spent time in an Evangelical church as a child, but eventually became disengaged from his faith through middle school and high school. After high school, Creighton was lead to the Assemblies of God, where much of his faith formation has taken place. He is very much ‘in progress,’ but is theologically best described as a Reformed Pentecostal.
Articles by Creighton | Academic Website
Matthew Bryan
Matthew is a post-Protestant disciple of Jesus, an avid disciple-maker, a father of 2 grown men, and the delighted husband of Kristy. He holds a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude from the University of Memphis and has authored 3 books. A former church planter, Matthew now serves within the Restoration Movement. He enjoys reading the letters of Desiderius Erasmus, learning the history of empires, and encouraging believers to take up Biblical Greek for the twin purposes of clarity and unity.
Christian Background: Matthew grew up attending a Protestant home church, but did not come to faith until the age of 22. He spent another 17 years in 3 consecutive Protestant denominations, first in dispensationalism, next being personally discipled in a nondenominational setting, and finally learning the values of the Restoration Movement. Due to his historical investigations, Matthew teaches scripture not from a Protestant perspective, but from an historic and global Christian understanding that includes “Christus Victor” and embracing the Septuagint.
Chris Casberg
Chris is a reader, writer, student, and husband all rolled into one fleshy package. He earned his B.A. in Global Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and now pursues a Master of Arts in Christian Apologetics at Biola University. He spent five years on active duty in the US Marine Corps, where he served as a translator of Middle Eastern languages. Chris currently lives with his beautiful wife and their incorrigible dog in the high desert of rural Central Oregon, where the craft beer flows like the Nile in flood season and the wild deer stare through your window at night.
Christian Background: Until the age of eighteen, Chris slept in every Sunday morning and left church to those silly, pretentious individuals who called themselves Christian. Chris was smart, smart people were atheists, and that’s all there was to it- until depression and a struggle for meaning led him to the door of a Christian friend who helped him turn to God for answers. He’s been picking God’s brain ever since. Always on the move, Chris has attended (and appreciated!) churches in a variety of locations and denominations over the years. Currently he and his wife attend the Free Methodist Church in Madras, Oregon.
Articles by Chris | Personal Website
Michael Landsman
Michael serves as the Interim Pastor of Zion’s Stone UCC in Northampton, PA. After high school he moved to Johannesburg, South Africa and earned a Higher Diploma in Ministerial Studies at Rhema Bible College in Randburg while also working for its parent mega-church. After moving back to the US he floundered around in various jobs before moving to PA to pursue education and ministry. He holds a Master of Divinity from Biblical Theological Seminary. He loves books, theology, cigars, scotch, movies, video games, working out, and talking endlessly about all of the above. He and his long suffering and loving wife Chontey live in Wind Gap and are expecting their first child.
Christian Background: Michael was born and raised in the Word-Faith stream of the Charismatic Tradition. A Bible nerd since childhood, he learned to love Scripture by listening to his mother teach him Bible stories every day. He learned to love the Church and education through the tireless work of his father, who was an itinerant teacher setting up local Bible schools for churches to better educate their congregants. After working for a charismatic mega-church overseas he became disillusioned with Word-Faith and Charismatic theology and put faith aside until he came across the teaching of Tim Keller and the Reformed Tradition. This started a period of discernment and prayer which led to him moving to PA to work at a non-denominational church and to attend seminary. While at seminary he slowly realized he was not Reformed, after being exposed to the Orthodox Tradition. This ignited in him a love of the Church Fathers, especially St. John Chrysostom, and he tries to integrate the best of their theology into his current context. He half-jokingly refers to himself as post-charismatic, non-denominational, and Ortho-curious.
Drew McIntyre
The Rev. Drew McIntyre is an Elder in the Western North Carolina Conference and serves West Bend UMC in Asheboro, NC. Born and raised in the Tar Heel state, he was educated at High Point University (B.A. History, B.A. Religion) and Duke Divinity School (M.Div., Certificate in Gender, Theology, & Ministry). Drew enjoys spending time with his wife, Brittany, playing with their pets, reading, and watching movies. He is avid fan of mixed martial arts and Duke basketball, and also blogs at DrewBMcIntyre.com. Follow him on twitter @drewbmcintyre.
Christian Background: Drew was baptized as an infant at a small United Methodist Church in Eastern North Carolina. Most of his elementary, middle, and secondary education was undertaken at a Southern Baptist institution, while his family only attended church occasionally. He and his family became active in a United Methodist congregation once more in high school, and while in college became a certified candidate for ordination, before going on to seminary and being ordained through the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. Drew has a love for liturgy, doctrine, and church history, especially Wesleyan and Patristic sources.
Articles by Drew | Personal Website
Micah McMeans
Micah has been an avid reader, writer and artist since he can remember (though he admits that calling myself an artist is a stretch, and merely claims to draw and paint in his spare time). He will be attending the College at Southwestern in the fall as a Sophomore, where he hopes to satisfy his newly found passions for theology and philosophy. Micah’s future plans are vague, though he feel a strong call to write and speak publicly in response to his passionate desire to influence the church and culture.
Christian Background: Though he grew up in the bible belt as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid, Micah became a prodigal son in his later teenage years. Though not proud of his past, it has helped make him who he is today, and Micah thanks God that He can always bring good out of bad. As we all should be, Micah continues to learn and grow in his faith. Although he lean towards Baptist doctrine, he is still in the process of forming his own theological convictions. Micah writes, “I like to think of myself as a Christian saved by Grace alone, and hope to see the Church of God someday be thought less of as individual groups and more of as a single unit and body.”
Kenneth A. O’Shaughnessy
Ken is a middle-aged father of four. He’s a Northerner by upbringing, but has lived in the South since his (first) college days. Twenty years after a brief attempt to earn a degree at Bob Jones University, he went back to college and obtained an Associates degree in Human Services. During that time he began to do more than just dabble with writing, and has self-published a children’s picture book, a middle-reader’s book, and several collections of poetry. He has continued writing poetry primarily, averaging a poem of some sort per day for the past two and a half years.
Christian Background: Ken was baptized in the Roman Catholic church, raised in the fundamentalist Baptist church, spent his early child-rearing years in the Reformed Baptist church, and after dabbling in the Anglican and Catholic churches, settled down in the Eastern Orthodox church, where he has been since 2006. His primary influence toward traditional Christianity, unwittingly at the time since it was only his fiction he was reading, was G. K. Chesterton. In addition, he found an appreciation for monastic devotional writings through reading Thomas a Kempis. His poetic influences come largely from the hymns he grew up singing and playing on the trumpet. It just so happened that his favorite hymn tunes to play were written by the Russian Orthodox musician Dmitry Bortniansky, something he wouldn’t realize until after his conversion to Orthodoxy. He attends St John of the Ladder OCA in Greenville, SC, where he serves as bellringer.
Articles by Kenneth | Personal Website
Elizabeth Roosje
Elizabeth’s world includes many icons, books, paints, skeins of yarn, fabric for quilts, and boxes and shelves of journals. She is married to her best friend, a computer scientist, writer and Orthodox subdeacon. Elizabeth has an Honours BA in English Lit and a Masters of Library and Information Science. She worked as a librarian in various private libraries in Ottawa, Ontario Canada before moving to a New Jersey bedroom community of NYC. Elizabeth’s life revolves around these things: home (culinary, knitting, quilting pursuits), reading and writing, her godkids, 16 nieces and nephews and serving with her husband at their Church (Sunday School, Bookstore and Library). Orthodox for over 12 years, Elizabeth has blogged for over 10 years at https://eroosje.blogspot.com/ and is happy to be writing amidst others who love Christian dialogue.
Christian Background: Elizabeth was born into a Christian family with a long history of faithfulness to God and His Word through the lens of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) Tradition and Dutch Protestant Christian culture, having a unified world of CRC family, Church and School. To this day, she thanks God for such a wonderful Christian upbringing. In her late teens, at Calvin College, she was introduced to the Episcopal Church, the American Anglican Prayer Book and the Eucharist (as taught in a Christology course using a Catholic Seminarian Textbook). After some years of going between CRC, Evangelical and Episcopal/Anglican Churches in Canada, she attended only Conservative Anglican Churches, until one day when a friend took her to an Orthodox Church in Lent of 2003. By Summer’s end, she went again to this Orthodox Church; before the end of the next year’s Summer, she was welcomed into the Orthodox Church by chrismation on August 8, 2004. Being Orthodox now for just over 12 years, she rejoices in both the Orthodox Church and also Christian upbringing and spiritual journey that brought her to this place.
Articles by Elizabeth | Personal Website
Peter Schellhase
Peter Schellhase is 30 years old and calls himself a Millennial (and occasionally, a hipster) as a form of penance. He is a writer and editor for Home School Legal Defense Association in Northern Virginia, where he lives with his wife and baby daughter, and is active in a local Episcopal church. He has a bachelor’s degree in political theory from Patrick Henry College. He enjoys reading aloud with his wife, playing with their daughter, cycling, and of course writing.
Christian background: Peter grew up attending Covenant Life Church in Maryland, where he encountered God’s grace as a teenager. In college he became convinced of the historic liturgical and sacramental understanding of the church, and was eventually led to join the Episcopal Church. The most influential book on this journey was Dr. Gene Veith’s The Spirituality of the Cross. Recently he has appreciated the work of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and the ancient Church Fathers. His statements and opinions carry nobody’s imprimatur.