I have never been one to set writing goals.  In fact, despite the fact that many creative and prolific writers swear by them, there is something about having to write a certain number of pages, or for a certain number of hours every day, that sucks the creative wind right out of me. I prefer the romantic notion of being inspired by the muse over the practicality of sitting down and hammering out a certain number of words a day.  

But, in writing as in life, the practical often trumps the romantic and we are forced to create within the bounds of deadlines and responsibilities.  For me, that means delivering a 60,000 word manuscript to my acquisitions editor by February 15, 2009.  This is not a loose deadline.  I am contractually bound to make it happen.

To get there, I've set a personal goal of writing 1000 words a day, six days a week for six weeks. 

After more than four years of drafting, bumbling, abandoning projects and starting new ones I am thrilled to share that the Christian imprint of a large publishing house that has agreed to take on my first book. It is a personal narrative called (surprise, surprise) Flirting with Faith: My Journey from Atheism to Agnosticism to a Devoted Life.  

This is a mini-miracle for several reasons.  

• I'm still floored by the fact that I wound up a Christian in the first place, so becoming a Christian author is further evidence that God both has a sense of humor and that He can (and does) do things that are beyond our wildest expectations.
• New and untested voices are risky for publishers and I am about as much of a nobody from nowhere as one can be in this marketplace.  
• While I've had articles published in Christian magazines, I have no big ministry or church or radio/tv show to use as a stepping-off point to promote this book.
  continue reading

A couple of weeks ago (everything pre-election seems a world away, doesn't it?) there were some posts and comments on ConversantLife.com regarding whether or not Christians should apologize for the sins of past generations. Some felt that acknowledgement of past wrongs (slavery, the Inquisition) would help to heal wounds and promote authenticity. Others felt that, while these were intolerable events, the past is in the past and it is impossible (or unnecessary) to repent for other people's sins.

All of this got me wondering what the recipients of these apologies might think.  

How might your average skeptic, atheist, agnostic or disgruntled/hurt-by-the-church Christian respond to an apology?  Would it help or further hinder their perception of Christians and the Church? 

Nine year old Moey Strombler dressed like a voting booth for Halloween and collected his candy on one side or the other of his makeshift voting table. He and his family put together a pretty slick website and posted video of the vote and tally of results.  Check out www.candyvote.com if you need a break from the next 24 hours of colored maps and politico speculation. 

Happy voting,,, 

Before I left corporate to write and teach full time, I spent about 15 years as a PR strategist and corporate spokesperson for a variety of professional services firms in New York.  I was one of "those people" who sat with CEOs, politicians and corporate executives and helped them to develop their mission and values and positioning statements and to create a dialog and presence of mind among their publics (clients, media, Wall Street, government, etc.)  As you might imagine, this work frequently involved helping people to respond to crisis or criticism.   I still do some consulting work, but mostly I have traded the full-time 60-70 hour a week corporate PR game for writing and teaching marketing and communication at a Catholic University in New York.

So, why all of this background?

In my last post I talked about the importance of finding a way to be unified within the Body of Christ...to honor the call to unity in the Body and to create a more attractive and hospitable place for the newcomer.  I had an experience today so plainly illustrated this point that I felt like I was in a movie.

Here's the scene.

A highly attractive, surprisingly young-looking 42 year old writer sits in a cafe... 

Okay...okay, let me start again.

I'm sitting in the cafe where I write 6 days a week. This is a funky little spot with a spiritually diverse clientel. Lots of true and/or wanna be Buddists, Yogis and Wiccans, Tarot readings on Thursday nights, relatively mild punk shows on the weekend, that kind of spot.  For whatever reason, this is where I've been led to plant myself to write Christian blogs, grade papers and read the Bible. Nobody minds...I'm just another quirky character in the mix.

I'm not giving up on the Church... 

Despite some unfortunate evidence to the contrary, I believe that the church can be a place where broken and hurting people of all stripes can go to find Jesus shared and reflected in the lives of leaders and members.  I believe that it can be a sanctuary where poor, struggling, addicted, mentally ill, self-harming, harsh and hard-to-love people can mingle with and be supported by people who are wealthy or stable or sober or emotionally healthy and peaceful without feeling judged or unwelcome. I believe that Christians of different ages and backgrounds and interests can worship together out of respect for one another and Christ’s call to unity, sustaining the whole by putting the needs of others ahead of personal comfort, preference or ambition.

 Now this is a debate I can sink my teeth into...

Both of my parents died six months ago. It was April.  My mom from cancer that she’d been battling for a couple of years. My father from a stroke that took him in 5 days.  He went first.  Twenty—or was is 22—days before his wife of 46 years.  They were young by today’s standards.  Sixty-five and Sixty-seven. 

I’ve cried a few times.  Quickly. Quietly.  Willing but not quite able to muster the turning-the-corner-into-anger sort of tears that would signal my official descent into the widely accepted stages of grief. 

I’ve purposely not spent too much time reacquainting myself with the stages of grief.  Rather than stack the deck against myself by the power of suggestion, I figured I’d allow the emotions and memories to gather together like raindrops on windowpane,linking together slowly, one by one, until their combined weight was enough todraw them downward.

My latest InTouch article, From Debate to Dialog: Bridging the Spiritual Communication Gap, is in the October issue.  It's a little too long for a blog post, so I figured I'd just share a link to a pdf copy of the magazine here. 

The piece, which is on page 10, examines the fine line between debate and dialog through the lens of my own personal struggle with self-righteous, gotta-be-right communication, both when I was an atheist and in the years following my Conversion to Christianity.  Some of the anecdotes are excerpted from the third chapter of a book I am working on, so comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated.