Hi, it’s great to meet you!

Thank you for your presence here. I’m a writer, licensed professional counselor, and researcher who likes to think about scripture, science, and family systems processes. What choices does one have to be more of a self while also staying in lively emotional contact with our own families, congregations, workplaces, and communities? It’s a good question, right?

Back in the day, I was a public health professional. I was fortunate to work in health planning at local, state, and national levels, and to learn how to use local data to capture the story of a community’s health. My most important learning, though, probably came from the two years I worked in a local health department’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinic, where those numbers came alive.  

While my children were young, I worked part-time, doing stints as a community college professor and as a religious education director. Those years were the inspiration for my first book, The Devil’s Inbox, a re-do of the Screwtape Letters, with an email format and an all-female cast.

The emotional side of health has always interested me. Recently, I went back to school and received a PhD in counselor education and supervision from the Pastoral Counseling Department of Loyola University, Maryland. Now, I’m on the faculty of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. I have a small private practice. And in my research, I’m finding that unit functioning – specifically, in congregations – is both observable and measurable when seen from a family systems view.

Research also played a part in my second book. With a research question of whether the scriptures – specifically, the Sunday readings of the Revised Common Lectionary – contained family systems concepts, I blogged weekly about the readings. I found that a family systems way of seeing the material was not only possible, but also that it added to my understanding of the text. When I finished the three-year cycle, I decided to write a book about what I had learned. I wanted to write something fresh and fun – and All the Families of the Earth: Therapists in Bible Times was the result. Have you read it? Please let me know what you think!