I am a 32-year-old Michigan expat living in Bristol, UK.  I share my abode with my husband, a mathematician, our nearly 2-year-old son, and our black cat, Joab (we adopted him the same year ‘Absalom’ torpedoed my dad’s career, hence the name).  We expect to welcome baby #2 in January 2020.

I have a PhD in Greek & Latin from University College London; my specialty is in Latin epic poetry.  I have two articles published in academic volumes (with Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury), and hope to have a monograph adaptation of my dissertation published in 2021.  These points I include to demonstrate that I have experience in research, and more importantly, in working with language(s).  When not doing academic things, most of my work experience has been in hospitality and food service (the real world).

Though I grew up (from about 8 years of age) in a denomination where ‘Christian’ education is encouraged, and in some places, expected, I went to public schools my whole life.  For my undergraduate degree, I went to Hillsdale College.  Once I’d been accepted there, more than one person at our church at the time asked, with some feeling, ‘Don’t you want to go to Calvin (the denomination’s flagship college)?’  NO.  I didn’t.  I wanted to go to a place where I would be taught to think, and be challenged to know what I believe, why I believe it, and live accordingly.  As an aside, Hillsdale is the kind of place where non-denominational kids go to get converted to something older, typically turning to Rome but sometimes to Lutheranism or Greek Orthodoxy.  Their ‘no creed but Christ’ upbringing is incongruous with the respect for tradition and the acknowledgement of the value of the past that is so encouraged at Hillsdale.  When toiling through Western Heritage and the Great Books courses, one realizes how rootless much of the American church really is.  The impression I got from Calvin alums was that many Christian kids went there to get converted to a theologically liberal political activism…

At any rate, my desire to go to a place where I would ‘be taught to think’ betrays my bias at the time, which has not been much altered by 10+ more years of life experience–so many of the young people from our church who went to ‘Christian’ school would be going to Calvin as a matter of course; many of them showed minimal commitment in high school, and fell off the bandwagon of the faith as young adults.  I was not motivated to go to a ‘Christian’ college where so much would be taken for granted, and where indeed orthodoxy has been, apparently, consistently undermined over the past decade (paralleling the trajectory of the denominational magazine, The Banner).  Indeed, after my younger sister’s experience at ‘Christian school’ (which she attended for 3 years), and after this experience at my father’s former church, where so many of the older adults and their kids attended ‘Christian school’, I can’t see that it makes much difference.  I don’t see that for the majority of the students, ‘a Christian education’ is more likely than a secular one to engender love and fear of the Lord, knowledge of Christ’s character and expectations of his people, groundedness in Scripture and Proverbial common sense, ability to think critically and biblically, and simple bearing of good fruit.  Thus the tongue-in-cheek title of this blog.

My husband and I attend a small independent evangelical church here in Bristol.  Both of us are pastor’s kids, though my husband’s father left the pastorate fairly early in his career to take up a position at his denomination’s seminary, as professor of Old Testament and Hebrew.  My husband–an academic in ‘Pure Maths’–and I are both committed Reformed believers; we love the Lord, we love our church, we love God’s word,  and we love thinking about what it is, and who He is.  We currently lead the young people’s group in our church. We both love to read.

If you check out my personal blog, you will see that what is going on in the American church at large interests me just as much as what happened in my home church at Aetna, documented here at A Christian Education.  For (much) more qualified observations on American ‘evangelical’ culture and issues in the church, I direct the reader to recent books like those by David Wells, e.g. God in the Whirlwind and The Courage to be Protestant, and to T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns and Why Johnny Can’t Preach.

I will close by saying that I am a rather ordinary person.  I can be summed up very simply: I like countryside views, cats, ’80s music, watching cheesy action films with my husband (preferably with Liam Neeson in them), reading books with my son, laughing with my family, and enjoy coffee, cake, real ales and a good curry.