Human beings are complicated creatures. Our stories are rarely neat. So how should I summarize mine? I’m a novelist, essayist, Army veteran, former defense contractor, and native 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 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 the 2020 pandemic, living in Israel until 2021, taking psychedelics in 2022, and reading a lot of classical Western literature in 2023, I underwent a worldview shift in my thirties that resulted in a recovery of my belief in God, my conversion to Hebrew Catholicism, adoption of cultural Judaism, and embrace of a “countercultural cultural conservatism” that fuses economic populism with traditional social values.
You can still find essays from my previous life under Young Heathen. But I do hope you’ll find my recent work on Cowboy Mystic to be more engaging, enraging, and enchanting. Driven 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, I loved the work of H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, A.A. Gill, Anthony Bourdain, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Since 2020 however, I’ve come to enjoy the work of Yoram Hazony, Anthony Esolen, Peter Kreeft, Ed Feser, Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, Harold Bloom, and Roger Scruton, as well as the fiction of Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
Places I’ve Been Published: The Federalist, Intellectual Takeout, Outlaw Poetry, Areo Magazine (defunct), Topical Magazine (defunct), Paste Magazine
What I Enjoy When Not Writing: visiting old cathedrals, castles, and synagogues; smelling new leather; smoking cigars; eating barbecue; drinking Dr. Pepper (sweet nectar of the Good Lord); betting on horse races; shooting at the range; praying the rosary; reading by big fireplaces; listening to ZZ Top; watching the Longhorns play football.
Patron Saints: St. Michael the Archangel (patron of warriors and veterans), St. Edith Stein (patron of Jewish Catholics), St. Francis de Sales (patron of writers), St. Christopher (patron of travelers), St. Billy Gibbons (patron of sharp dressed men)