Human beings are complicated creatures. Our stories are rarely neat. So how should I summarize mine? I’m a novelist, essayist, Army Infantry veteran, former defense contractor, and native Texan. I’ve traveled all over the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and Middle East, mostly in a professional capacity taking part in security, extraction, and intelligence missions.
Ethnically Jewish but raised evangelical, in my twenties I became an atheist and was an active writer among the “anti-woke left” between 2014-2019. Yet after living in Israel and exploring my family’s history from 2018-2021, enduring the pandemic of 2020, and reading a lot of classic Western literature from 2022-2023, I underwent a radical worldview shift in my thirties that resulted in a recovery of my belief in G-d, conversion to Judaism, and embrace of a postliberal conservatism that combines populist economics with traditional social values.
You can still find essays from my previous life under my old blog Young Heathen. But I do hope you’ll find my recent articles on Cowboy Mystic to be more engaging, enraging, and enchanting.
Influences: Prior to 2020, I loved H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, Anthony Bourdain, A.A. Gill, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Since 2020 however, I’ve come to enjoy the work of Yoram Hazony, Patrick Deneen, Rabbi David Novak, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Theodor Herzl, Wendell Berry, Harold Bloom, and Roger Scruton, as well as the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, John le Carré, and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Ovid. Influences throughout my adult life that have persisted through my political and spiritual shifts have been Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, while two philosophers who are not influences but “guilty pleasures” are Machiavelli and Nietzsche.
Places I’ve Been Published: The Federalist, Intellectual Takeout, Outlaw Poetry, Areo Magazine, Topical Magazine, Paste Magazine, Thought Catalog
What I Love Besides Writing: smoking cigars and Marlboro Reds, riding horses, shooting guns, reading Tanakh, going camping, exploring National Parks, worshipping at synagogue, talking to older veterans, watching football (Texas Longhorns), sitting by big fireplaces, listening to ZZ Top or Paul Cauthen, eating kosher barbecue, drinking an ice-cold Dr. Pepper or Shiner, touring gothic cathedrals and castles, spending too much money on boots, and falling asleep to true crime or paranormal podcasts.