Human beings are complicated creatures. Our stories are rarely neat. So how should I summarize mine? I’m a husband and lover to a beautiful woman. Father and hero to a wonderful son. A novelist, essayist, Army veteran, former defense contractor, and Texan. I’ve traveled all over the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, mostly in a professional capacity taking part in security and intelligence missions.
Ethnically and culturally Jewish, but raised Christian, in my twenties I became an atheist and was an active writer among the “anti-woke left” between 2014-2019. Yet after the pandemic of 2020, taking psychedelics in 2022, and reading many of the Medieval to Victorian classics in the Western canon in 2023, I underwent a worldview shift in my thirties that resulted in a recovery of my belief in God, an embrace of “counter-cultural cultural conservatism”, and my conversion to High Church Anglicanism.
You can still find writings from my previous life on here under Young Heathen. But I hope you’ll find my recent essays on Cowboy Mystic to be more engaging, enraging, and enchanting. Driven in part by the Renaissance proverb that “A well-rounded man must be an artist, a warrior, and a philosopher”, I’ve been grabbing life by the horns for 34 years and hope to wrestle it 66 more.
❧Influences: Prior to 2020, my influences were H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, Anthony Bourdain, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Since 2020 however, I’ve come to enjoy the work of Yoram Hazony, Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, St. Gregory of Nyssa, David Bentley Hart, Harold Bloom, and Roger Scruton, as well as the fiction of Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
Scientific, economic, political, literary, and spiritual concepts that shape my thinking and work: Morphic Resonance, Evolutionary Psychology, Gender Essentialism ▪︎ Distributism, Gold-Backed Money, Worker Cooperatives, Farmers’ Markets, Homesteading, Decentralized Banking, Bartering, Classical Education ▪︎ Cultural Conservatism, Secessionism/Balkanization, Localism, Zionism, “Christendom 2.0”, a Jewish-Christian alliance against enemies of Israel and the West ▪︎ Noir, Neo-Noir, Retrofuturism, Southern Gothic, “Catholic Imagination”, Gonzo Journalism ▪︎ Plato’s Theory of Forms, Jung’s Archetypes, Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”, Praeparatio Evangelica, Postmillenialism, Patristic Universalism, Exotheology, Anglican “Via Media”, Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Intercession of Departed Saints, Veneration of Mary/Icons