Human beings are complicated creatures. Our stories are rarely neat. So how should I summarize mine? First, 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 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 pandemic of 2020, taking psychedelics in 2022, and reading many classics in the Western canon between 2021-23, I underwent a dramatic worldview shift in my thirties that resulted in a recovery of the transcendent, my conversion to Hebrew Catholicism, and embrace of a “counter-cultural cultural conservatism”.

You can still find writings from my previous life (as I don’t believe in erasing pasts), but I hope you’ll find my recent essays on history, philosophy, and society 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 33 years and hope to wrestle it 67 more.

Influences: My influences used to be Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Ovid, Sidney Hook, Nick Cohen, Anthony Bourdain, George Orwell, Huey Long, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. But now I’ve gone on to enjoy the work of Peter Kreeft, Yoram Hazony, Anthony Esolen, Abp. Fulton Sheen, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theodor Herzl, Wendell Berry, and Roger Scruton, as well as the fiction of Roald Dahl, Cormac McCarthy, J.R.R. Tolkien, and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Target audience: While my essays/books are for anybody interested, when I write I have in mind young men with military backgrounds, 23-30, looking for meaning and attempting to navigate a culture hostile to them and the things they value.

Philosophies That Shaped Me: Zionism, Southern Agrarianism, Localism, Natural Law, Plato’s Theory of the Forms, Campbell’s Theory of the Hero’s Journey, Jungian Archetypes, “Scrutonian Environmentalism”