Do you think that as a young Oklahoma Southern Baptist boy I knew I would become a Zen Buddhist Daoist Jewish [Southern?] Baptist Agnostic Storyteller transplanted to Virginia, or as some would say, a ZenBuDaoJuBap (sounds like do-wop from the fifties) and teach at Radford University in Southwestern Virginia? Well, it was a crooked creek path but I followed it. Let me describe a bit for you.  

I grew up in Midwest City, Oklahoma, and graduated from Midwest City High School. Since Tinker Air Force Base dominated the life of "America's Model City," we were called the Midwest City Bombers. Indeed, our school had to decide whether we wanted a tile B-52 bomber in the entryway floor or a surplus, stripped bomber in the field across the street.  

I attended Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma, because it was the hub of Baptist life and because I had been "called" into the gospel ministry. What an exciting place to be for a fine Liberal Arts education. I began as a math major, shifted to a biology concentration for one semester, and ended up as a history major. One of the better teachers at O.B.U., and I enrolled with several of the best, was Dr. John Eighmy, who unfortunately died the second semester of my senior year. You see, the seminary which I had decided to attend, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (S.B.T.S.--not an option now for persons of vigorous faith, but a great place for persons of fixed beliefs and narrow creeds, a place that has generally maligned the saintly scholars who taught me), told me that my major did not matter; I would get the majority of my Biblical, Theological, and Practical education there. Although a religion major would have moved me to upper division courses sooner, my history major provided complementary skills and knowledge.  

When I arrived at S.B.T.S., I let my "freak flag fly". I came to prepare for the gospel ministry and to see if the church, as Paul Simon suggested, was dead. Of course, if the (present incarnation) church had died, I didn't need to lament for the resurrection of the church might be an exciting, if not necessary, opportunity. I count my satire in the student paper "The Gadfly" as some of my favorite work. Some of my favorite professors were Dr. Owens, who modeled how an person from the Sooner State could trust his faith and his intellect, Dr. Hinson, who introduced me to the history and traditions of Christian devotion by means of his classes and his personal living, Dr. McGlon, who taught me about living deeply, and Dr. Williams, who taught me about the multifaceted history of ancient Israel which is suggested in the Hebrew Bible.

As I was preparing to leave the seminary, I realized my call was not to the parish but to the university community. So I applied to graduate school and attended Vanderbilt.   At Vanderbilt, I continued the study of the Hebrew Bible that Drs. Owens, Williams, Kelley, Francisco, and Tate had opened up for me in seminary and I completed that degree in May, 1983, a year after I had arrived at Radford University from Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, where I had taught for a year.   I remember that Dean Stump asked me, during my interview for the position at Radford, if I thought I could teach in a state university since I had been in exclusively religious schools. My answer corrected his view that Vanderbilt was a religious school and assured him that my vocation was education not indoctrination. Dr. Dedmon asked me about the difference between preaching and teaching. I didn't answer him on metaphysical grounds; I merely told him of my conduct in the classrooms of Stetson University, which was a Baptist school (at that time). Both of these administrators approved when the department recommended me for employment. Interestingly, my next door neighbor in Nashville, TN, home of Vanderbilt, was a former colleague of my new department chairman, Dr. Charles Taylor. In addition, my wife hailed from Richmond, VA, so the department felt that with those ties to Virginia, I might stay around longer than my predecessors. And I have . . . .

I might add just a word about my "title," that is Zen Buddhist, Daoist, Jewish, Baptist, Agnostic. "In a word" Zen Buddhism has to do with deeply attentive compassion, Daoism points to our place in the larger framework of the natural world, Judaism speaks about the rich life offered to one who lives in relationship to God, Baptist refers to one Christian tradition in which I was raised so that it became my entryway to spirituality and truth seeking/living, and Agnostic, used in the sense that Leslie Weatherhead employed it in his book, The Christian Agnostic, means that we can never know all there is to know in order to construct an intellectual system which is absolutely complete, or, even relatively whole. Deep, rich spirituality maintains that we walk by faith and not by our certainty, we see in part now, but will some day see the whole picture. And, I might add, that "some day" is not when we get a diploma; that "some day" is when our eye-blink of a life is finished and we are harvested.