Autobiography (abridged)
I am enormously privileged to have received a quality education, which began at Covenant Christian Academy in Colleyville, TX. Teachers at CCA inculcated in me the rudimentary principles of reading and writing, and they introduced me to classic texts that challenged me to think deeply about myself, God, and the world.
During my high school years, I began a religious inquiry that led me to embrace the theology of the Reformation. I had been raised in a Christian home, but I was freshly drawn to Presbyterianism because it demands meticulous attention to the text of Scripture and manifests an elegant systematic theology. As I learned more about my newly adopted tradition, I naturally desired to share that experience with others, and so I began preparing to become a clergyman.
After graduating from CCA in 2000, I journeyed 800 miles to Lookout Mountain, Georgia to attend Covenant College, where I earned a B.A. History. The experience shaped my thinking immeasurably. Because Covenant is an official denominational college (PCA), I learned both to challenge and to appreciate the beauty of my tradition through my particular discipline, historical research and writing. The benefit of my undergraduate education, then, was not merely the accumulation of facts but the maturation of a posture toward life which appreciates intricacy and subtlety and which refuses to gloss complication and contradiction. Though I entered Covenant with a monochromatic vision of the world, I departed with an increasingly colorful and detailed mosaic.
After graduating from Covenant in 2004, I accepted an internship position at my home church, Colleyville Presbyterian, where I served from 2004-2005. There I experienced both the joys and the demands of daily ministry alongside fellow staff members. I remain in awe of those whom I witnessed investing themselves in the work of the Church, but over that year I learned that their calling was not my own. During that same year, I had returned to teach at CCA, and I found that teaching suited me. During my three-year tenure at CCA (2004-2007), however, my carreer path led me away from CCA because I desired to pursue a Ph.D. and because of a piece of advice I received from Louise Cowan, who told me, “If you want to work with people and to gain mastery over your curriculum, then teach in high school. But if you want to work with texts and ideas and to quest after wisdom, then teach in a university.” I chose the latter, though I still treasure the memories of working alongside colleagues (some who were my former teachers) who devoted themselves fully to their students and who firmly believed in the enduring value of the liberal arts.
My graduate work began in the summer of 2005 at the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, where I attended a class called “Tragedy and Comedy”. The class launched me into the graduate program at UD, which I continued for two years while still teaching at CCA. Graduate education has actualized potentialities in myself that I never had thought possible and continues to sharpen my thinking, reading, and writing. During the 2007-2008 school year, I began full-time graduate study and completed a Master’s degree in English. Most recently, I have begun a doctoral program in literature at UD. My research interests include Shakespeare, the English sonnet tradition, and the rhetorical tradition. Positing Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella as an intertext for Shakespeare’s Sonnets, my dissertation will advance a rhetorical-poetic reading of both sequences.
