🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

Greetings, dear newsletter subscribers!

Since I am taking a brief hiatus from posting videos, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you a little bit more about myself…hopefully you will find it of interest!

I was born in Oxford, England, but my first home was Guatemala City, Guatemala. My father was an American diplomat, so growing up we moved every few years. I began kindergarten in Hong Kong, and graduated high school in Bangkok, Thailand, with many stops in between. I spent sixteen years in higher education, completing my first degree (BA), a triple major in English Literature, History, and Theology, from Wheaton College. After Wheaton, I spent six months in an Orthodox Christian monastery in England, which is where I first read Philip Sherrard’s book, The Eclipse of Man and Nature, a book that, as I’ve mentioned previously, had a lasting effect on me and was, in many ways, the impetus for You Are Not a Machine/Gadfly Academy.

Through the monastery in England, I learned about the opportunity to continue my studies in Thessaloniki, Greece. I relocated to Greece and spent my first year studying Modern Greek at the School of Modern Greek in the Philosophy School at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. If you are unfamiliar with Thessaloniki, it was the “second city” of Byzantium (after Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul), and one of the places St. Paul preached and to whom he wrote letters (1&2 Thessalonians).

For eight years, I was blessed to live in the Vlatadon Monastery (known in Thessaloniki as the “balcony of Thessaloniki”) overlooking the city, with the Aegean spread out below as a carpet. After my year of language study, I studied four years for a Bachelor of Theology (BTh), followed by six years of graduate study. My PhD dissertation had the title: “The Theological Anthropology and Cosmology of C. S. Lewis: An Orthodox Patristic Evaluation.” I have always loved C. S. Lewis, and I wanted to understand why his theology resonates so intensely with many in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

C. S. Lewis was one of the twentieth century’s great thinkers and his ability, not only to diagnose the ills of the modern world, but also to communicate both the ills and the cures to the common man, separate him from most of his contemporaries. Arguably his most important work, The Abolition of Man, provides a robust critique of the prevailing modern anthropology, and greatly aids one in getting re-oriented in the maelstrom of the modern world.

It was only after I wrote my dissertation that I came to see how the different intellectual influences on my life (especially Sherrard, Lewis, Dostoevsky, Sakharov, Rose, Postman, McLuhan, Ellul, and Illich) had shaped my understanding of the modern world, how it developed, as well as a vision for a way out of/through the mess.

Hopefully you’ve found this brief intellectual and spiritual biography of interest. Perhaps I will share more with you moving forward, though I do hope to post a video next week (likely a clip from my interview with Lance Strate). I hope to begin our public book study of Amusing Ourselves to Death in earnest on April 24!

Have a blessed weekend, and I'll be in touch again next week!

Warmly,

Herman