Contributors for Volume Two, Issue Three
J. Mark Bertrand
J. Mark Bertrand graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His recent fiction has appeared in InFuze Magazine and Hardluck Stories, and is forthcoming in Ankeny Briefcase. He is currently at work on a novel. Visit his site at www.jmarkbertrand.com.
Wesley Biddy
Wesley Biddy graduated from Duke University in 2005 with a Th.M. He has poetry published or forthcoming in The Nantahala Review, The Pedestal, Wicked Alice, ken*again, Language and Culture, and Radix. He is working on a novel.
Randy Boyagoda
Randy Boyagoda is a postdoctoral fellow with the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. His writing on religion, literature, politics and culture appears frequently in American and Canadian publications. Randy completed his Ph.D. in English at Boston University in December 2004 with a dissertation on immigration, race, and American identity in the fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. For the past four years, he has been a Doctoral Research Fellow with the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition to academic articles on twentieth century American literature and contemporary literary theory, he has published essays, opinion editorials, book reviews, and short fiction in several public policy, intellectual, and literary journals. His writing predominantly focuses on the interrelations of religion, literature, culture, and politics. He has written for The Walrus, The Claremont Review of Books, The National Review, First Things, Crisis, The American Enterprise, Mississippi Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, Descant, The Human Life Review, Postcolonial Text, The University of Toronto Quarterly, Religion and Literature, South Asian Review, and The World and I. He has recently been elected a postdoctoral fellow at the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame. (At the time this issue was published, Randy was Books Editor for tNP.)Allan Carlson
Allan Carlson is the president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. Dr. Carlson was appointed in 1988 by President Reagan to serve as a member of the National Commission on Children, on which he served through 1991. Widely respected for his groundbreaking historical and sociological work on the family, his books include Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis and The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
Tyrus Clutter
Tyrus Clutter is a painter and printmaker. He holds a BA in Painting from Spring Arbor University and an MFA in Painting from Bowling Green State University. Clutter's award-winning work can be found in many private collections as well as in the Print Collections of the New York Public Library and the Spencer Museum of Art, as well as the collections of Spring Arbor University and Union University. Images of Clutter's work have illustrated journals and magazines including The South Carolina Review, Chiron, The Christian Century, and Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture. The Beginning: A Second Look at the First Sin, by Square Halo Books, also incorporates Clutter's illustrations. Clutter currently resides in Massachusetts where he works as the director of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA.)
John Coleman
John Coleman is a 2004 graduate of Berry College where he received a BS in Economics and served as editor of ex caverna, the honors review. A 2004 recipient of the Georgia College Press Association's best column award, John has held fellowships with the Institute for Humane Studies and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and his fiction and non-fiction writings have appeared in such publications as Touchstone, Liberty, the Humane Studies Review, Winning Orations, Reason Online, National Review Online, Ramifications, the 9th edition of Understanding Human Communications, and a forthcoming anthology of religious writing to benefit the Andover Newton Theological School. He is a strategy and management consultant in Atlanta, GA.
Joe Gainer
Joseph Gainer has published poems and short stories in the Antietam Review, Oregon Review, Gargoyle, Phoebe, and other literary journals. He grew up in West Virginia and now lives near Washington, DC.
Bill Kauffman
Bill Kauffman, novelist and man of letters, is the associate editor of The Family in America, published by the Rockford Institute. His books include Every Man a King: A Novel (Soho, 1989), America First! (Promethues, 1995), Country Towns of New York (Country Roads Press, 1994, 1999), Murder, Mayhem, and Meathead, With Good Intentions? Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America (Praeger, 1998),A Story of America First: The Men and Women Who Opposed U.S. Intervention in World War II (Praeger, 2002), and Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive (Henry Holt, 2003). He is an historian of forgotten political and social movements and a fierce defender of local identity. His essays have appeared in many publications, including Reason, The Independent, The Wall Street Journal, Counterpunch, The American Enterprise, Chronicles Magazine, Liberty Magazine.
Peter Augustine Lawler
Dr. Lawler is Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia. He is author of Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), and editor of the quarterly journal Perspectives on Political Science. In March 2004, Dr. Lawler was named to the President's Council on Bioethics, chaired by Leon Kass.
Brian McLaren
Brian McLaren is a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian. He is also the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in the Washington-Baltimore area and the author of several books on contemporary and "postmodern" Christianity, including A New Kind of Christian and The Story We Find Ourselves In, both from Jossey-Bass.
Mike Pino
Michael Pino recently completed a study of the religious connotations and spiritual implication of religious recluses in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. He is currently studying Biblical Hebrew in preparation for work on Coleridge's translations. His work has been published in Language and Style and Philological Quarterly (forthcoming).
James V. Schall, S. J.
Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., is a professor of government at Georgetown University. He is a columnist for Crisis magazine and the author of numerous books and articles, the latest of which include Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lexington, 2004), The Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing. (ISI, 2001), Reason, Revelation, and Human Affairs: Selected Writings of James V. Schall (Lexington, 2001), and Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes. (Catholic University, 2000).
Joshua Skinner
Joshua Skinner is an attorney in Dallas, Texas, at the firm Fanning Harper and Martinson, P.C. His practice areas include local government defense, school law, and employment law. He lives in nearby tropical paradise Irving, Texas, with his wife and three children.
Ragan Sutterfield
Ragan Sutterfield teaches high school at Little Rock Christian Academy and is an apprentice sheep farmer.
Bobbe Taber
Ms. Taber's poem in this issue is from her unpublished book, Overcoming: One Person's Spiritual Journey. Her work has been published twice in Voices, in a book of award-winning poetry from the Dyer Ives Poetry contest, as well as in Big Fish Magazine, Fountain Flow, West Michigan magazine, Scene Magazine, and a forthcoming issue of Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature. Ms. Taber is the owner of Life Write Services, a company that uses writing classes as a way to build community, heal old wounds and celebrate the love in our lives. She is also the facilitator for Writers' Society, Ink, a writers' group that meets at her local daytime drop-in shelter. She earned a Master of Arts in Community Counseling from Western Michigan University where she studied writing as a way of healing.
Telford Work
Telford Work is principal and developer of Therapeias Health Management, LLC. He is also Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Westmont College.