Books


Biblical Characters

We Only Thought We Knew:

A Pharaoh, A Goddess, A Naked Young Man, even Moses & Jesus

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An exploration of Christianity as a generic religion rather than as theology, history, revelation, personal piety, or belief system.

Was Jesus the founder of Christianity? Was he even a Christian himself? Was Moses really a Jew? Provocative questions about the Bible's two star personalities, as well as several others, are addressed in this book which takes an updated look at Christianity through a number of Biblical characters who are not quite what we may have thought they were.

Not a devotional pilgrimage nor a pious Bible study, this book translates a variety of complicated religious concepts into easy-to-understand everyday language while spotlighting a lot of surprises along the way.

Most Christians today confuse "Jesus" with "Christ."

Jesus was the name of a specific man at a specific time and place. He's an obscure figure when viewed historically, and so much so that a minority of scholars even suggest that he never actually existed. But he is the central human figure in the four gospels of the New Testament.

Christ, on the other hand, is the name of a concept; an essentially Greek religious idea about a universal savior which was injected into what became Christianity by the so-called apostle Paul.

Whether or not "Jesus" and "Christ" were/are ultimately the same figure is the entire point of Christianity.

What we know as Christianity enters the picture when the combination is made. Thus we end up with a figure who is described by Christianity's main creed as "true man" and "true God" at one and the same time: "Jesus (who is believed by Christians to be the) Christ."

Religion for most people these days seems to be either a matter of highly personal and emotional attachments or a matter of complete indifference. I have tried to write a story which falls in the middle of those poles: the story of Christianity as one of many religions which have variously engaged millions of humans. The goal was neither devotional nor iconoclastic. The goal was to take a look at Christianity within the context of general human religious experience.




Winterset in Time:

Growing up Gay in Small Town Iowa

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What was it like to grow up in a small Midwestern town in the middle of the 20th Century? Idyllic in many ways. This book is a remembrance and a tribute to an American way of life beginning to fade in the face of advancing technology and the inevitable march of history.

A small town like Winterset, Iowa, is a time capsule for its golden era in the mid-20th Century, a treasury of Americana which not everyone experienced directly but which inhabits a corner of every American's imagination.

I've tried to share my hometown through the eyes of a school boy who saw it in the glorious color of childhood innocence, but who at the same time could not avoid the gray skies of puberty and of never quite feeling like just one of the boys. Gradually he began to suspect that he was actually one of the "boys who hadn't figured out how to appreciate girls as much as the script called for." Whether this tale makes you wish you too had grown up on a place like Winterset, or leaves you grateful you didn't, you'll get a new perspective on what it was like, and why anyone who did would never disown his hometown.

Growing up in a small town is almost the stuff of American legend. It suggests uncluttered, clear-eyed basic values of honesty, hard work, family orientation and neighborliness, and of entrepreneurial earnest striving. Small town Americans are supposed to be the strong backbone of the country, immune to the wiles of city life. Everyone, it seems, carries around a vision of small town life as part of the country's foundational integrity, but not everyone has actually experienced it firsthand.

"Prior to the twentieth century, Americans generally regarded the small town as a bastion of unspoiled innocence in an increasingly urban and mechanized world." (Nancy Heller & Julia Williams, The Regionalists: Painters of the American Scene, 1967, Watson-Guptill Publications,New York)

That perception, or willful characterization as the case may be, actually lived on well into the 20th Century and to a surprising extent even into the 21st. It absolutely colored my memory of my small hometown in Iowa both from actual experience and from the self-image of the adults around me while growing up who determinedly kept it alive through circumstances which both confirmed and contradicted the image.


Organists & Me:

Half a Century as an Agent for Musicians

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At the beginning of the 20th century the pipe organ was a major source of music for live audience consumption. As the century unfolded the organ had to yield a portion of the stage to upstart symphony orchestras, but despite rapidly changing musical tastes it remained a major player. The second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, however, had become a challenging period for both organists and their booking agents.

This is the story of one of the two agencies which dominated the American scene during that period, as told by the man who ventured from a Lutheran pulpit in New York City into the highly competitive and somewhat rarified world of performance musicians, with a stop along the way in the city room of a major American daily newspaper.

Were these organists and their agents a bickering mostly gay tribe defined by jealousies, or a self-protective band of loyalists defined by mutual love of, and sacrifice for, the King of Instruments? This book is part memoir, part historical account, and part commentary. It is also a peek behind the scenes of how the art of organ performance survived into the 21st century.