A Chicago native, I’ve found myself in rural America. The value of caring for the land so that it might provide for us – the value caring for other humans because we are linked in a community that is sometimes called a family – these are the values I share with this small town world.

 

A Swedish-American who is fascinated by the way our ancestors came to this country and redefined who and how they would be – this college is just the right spot for me to continue my research. In particular I’m fascinated by the way these immigrants used humor to create a set of community norms and to reflect the new community they were becoming.

 

A preacher, I’m enthralled by the word and the way words are used to convey transcendent realities. I want to know about God, to maintain a living and lively relationship with the divine. In the Christian tradition, as I understand it, that always leads me back to The Word and the words. So my life is spent in the study of words and how they work.

 

Over the years I’ve added a number of facets to my persona. In addition to being Rhetorically motivated, I’m also theatrically challenged. I mean by that, I’m challenged to transform my rhetoric into stage pictures that convey something of what I understand about the transcendent reality in which we live and move and have our being.

 

I’m also technologically semi-adept. I am not a true adept of technology – I don’t spend my time contemplating the 0s and 1s of programming language. I don’t even spend time writing the kind of coding that can make the mac do wondrous things (and yes, I am mac fluent – bi-lingual in fact, though I prefer mac) – but I am a more than adequate end user and I’m deeply involved in discovering how the new communication networks are affecting our communicative and rhetorical selves.