I am in the process of finishing my dissertation, working with the cultural terrain described and created when the languages of mythology and psychology intersect. As a student of David L. Miller, Christine Downing, Daniel C. Noel, and others identifying as "post-Jungian," reading and interacting with Thomas Moore, Sam Keen, and Huston Smith, and receiving advisory assistance from Dennis Slattery and William Doty, I have embarked on a phenomenological survey of traditional, contemporary, and emergent ideologies beneath living social structures and the theologies they imply. What emerges from this inquiry by association is a growing art of process, wherein how culture is created moves downstage of the industrial fascination with what it is possible to manufacture and distribute. Divinity often arrives in this equation in the guise of conflict itself, calling for a martial insistence on doing conflict well rather than defining peace in terms of its absence. Redefining peace in this way demands a new kind of purposeful community building which centralizes specific choice, co-creativity and governance, begins with social justice, and rediscovers the nourishing and terrifying mystery shrouding images of God wherever they may be found.

Since childhood I have been a professional vocalist and liturgist in the Christian church. As an adult I have participated fully and refrained from participating in both the United Methodist and Roman Catholic communities, and continue to visit and share in the ritual life of various faiths and local sects of various spiritual bodies, including the Karuk sweat tradition. Beginning my education immersed in the Montessori Method, I went on to a Jesuit College Prep high school and the University of Dallas for an intensive Liberal Arts Bachelors degree with emphasis in philosophy, theology, and history, a major in theater, and a semester of study in Rome. My graduate humanities degrees involve cultural study and criticism and are granted by Pacifica Graduate Institute as "Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology." Predominantly in the United States I teach and develop various Process Arts, a method called Associative Inquiry, a Japanese martial art called Aikido, and the non-profit Association Building Community and their Guardians of Peace project.

My first exposure to PCTS was finding and making reference to Claude Welch's writing on H. Richard Niebuhr, "The Making of an American Mind? and Andrew P. Porter "The Fertility of Niebuhr's Idea of Monotheism". I am grateful to Huston Smith for nominating me and hope to join in the conversation where it stands (or reclines, as the case may be) and look forward to many fruitful exchanges.

Labels: academy, bdwc, collegiality, membership, philosophy, theology