I was born and raised near Minneapolis. Perhaps the most formative experience of my childhood was going out with my father, who worked for the Red Cross, when he went to help victims of fires and floods who had lost their homes, their possessions, and, sometimes, their families. He would get the same calls as the fire department, and we would often arrive simultaneously, often in the deepest night, and confront the same tragedies the police and firemen confronted, only our responsibility was to provide aid and comfort. These experiences gave me a profound understanding of human suffering and hope, and left me with an indelible belief in a life of service. They also taught me how fragile our good fortune is, and how lucky and blessed I have been to live the life I've lived.
After high school I went to the University of Minnesota in American Studies, then to Stanford University in Religious Studies and Humanities, then to Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I received a Ph.D. in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley. My doctorate was in Religious Studies and Art. For many years I devoted my life to creating over-life sized sculptures from tree trunks. My heroes and mentors were Michelangelo, Donatello, and Rodin, all of whose works I had the good fortune to study in person while living for a time in Europe.
After returning to Minnesota, I moved north to the pine and lake country near the Canadian border, where my wife and I got married and have lived ever since. For several years I worked on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation helping students collect the memories of the tribal elders. This changed my life and introduced me to the native spiritual traditions that have become so central to the message in my writings.
I switched to writing from sculpture about 15 years ago when I realized that I could reach more people as a writer and that I had skills in that area.
My work has been a constant search, from various perspectives, for an authentic American spirituality, integrating our western Judeo-Christian tradition with the other traditions of the world, and especially the indigenous spirituality of the people who first inhabited this continent. Someone once called me a "guerilla theologian," and I think that is fairly accurate. I am deeply concerned with the human condition and our responsibility to the earth, the people on it, and the generations to come. I believe that we are, at heart, spiritual beings seeking spiritual meaning, and I try to honor this search wherever I discover it in the course of my daily life.
My wife and I live on a beautiful lake in northern Minnesota, where on good days we can listen to the whispering of the birches and the cries of the loons on the lake, and on bad days we huddle against -40 degree temperatures and winds swirling like banshees outside our window. We share our house with an earnest and loving golden lab and an irascible geriatric orange cat.
I have four children - three who came in the "package deal" with my wife, each wonderful and interesting in his or her own right, and each now into adulthood and building careers and family. The fourth, my biological son, is currently a student at Evergreen College in Washington state.
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I am hopeful for human beings because I believe that, at heart, we all seek the same thing - a chance to love and be loved, to raise good children, and to live in peace with our neighbors and families. That we so consistently fail to do so is troubling. And I admit to being deeply upset by the selfishness that is abroad in our own land - believing that we must look out first and foremost for ourselves - and the tendency, both here and abroad, to use religious belief to justify cruelty toward others.
. Can't imagine being old and having to go there dolo 
