Mine started with a mango I ate at work in 2016. I hadn’t properly tasted or smelled anything for decades—autism, masking, a sensory system that had decided protection mattered more than experience. Then one afternoon, a piece of mango. It exploded. That’s not metaphor.
What followed wasn’t pleasant. Sensory overload. Burnout. A cancer diagnosis. A pulmonary embolism that came close enough to count. And somewhere in that wreckage, questions I had suppressed for years surfaced without apology.
I had been a co-pastor for seventeen years—teacher, elder, someone who had genuinely tried to help a congregation move toward a more open way of thinking. When that ended, I left with two things: those questions, and the writing habit I had never quite developed.
Five books later, I’m still working on both.
The Unfiltered Thoughts of a Pastor in Exile (2022)
The first book was permission.
Not to attack the church I had left—that would have been too easy, and too small. The Unfiltered Thoughts of a Pastor in Exile was permission to say what I had long known: that the value system I had operated in was a stage, not the destination. That doubt isn’t the enemy of faith—certainty is. That a community organized around not asking certain questions is a pseudo-community, no matter how warm the coffee.
I introduced Spiral Dynamics as a framework for understanding why people talk past each other, why the same Bible produces contradictory theologies, and why growth always looks like betrayal to the stage you’re leaving. I used my own life as the primary case study.
I also wrote about being autistic for the first time. Not dramatically. As a fact.
The book is messy in the way first books often are—too much ground, not enough room to breathe between ideas. But it said what it needed to say: the map is not the territory, the institution is not God, and the questions you suppress are the most important ones you have.
The Unfinished Word (2025)
If the first book was about the institution, the second was about the text.
The Unfinished Word turns the same framework toward Scripture—not to undermine it, but to recover what layers of interpretation have buried. Every era reads the Bible through the lenses it has, which means every era reads it partially, in the precise meaning of that word. Blue sees sin and obedience. Orange sees individual dignity. Green sees inclusion. Yellow begins to see the pattern underneath all of them.
The Bible is not a fixed deposit of truth. It’s a record of an ongoing conversation that was never finished.
I worked through the Fall, through the different ways each value meme has read the story of Eden, through what those readings reveal about the readers as much as the text. And I developed what I call a theology of dialogue—the idea that genuine encounter, not correct doctrine, is what the biblical tradition is actually pointing toward.
It’s the most explicitly theological book I’ve written. It’s also the one where I most clearly stopped defending a position and started following an argument to see where it led.
Neurodivergent Genius (2025)
The third book was personal in a different way.
I had spent most of my life treating my neurodivergence as a liability to manage—the autism, the total aphantasia, the severely deficient autobiographical memory, the alexithymia. Things to work around. Burdens to carry quietly while appearing functional.
Neurodivergent Genius is the book where I stopped.
The hypothesis is simple: neurodivergent individuals—not despite their wiring but because of it—carry developmental potential that matters at precisely this moment in human evolution. Not as a hierarchy that elevates neurodivergent above neurotypical. As a recognition that different cognitive architectures produce different access to problems we’re collectively stuck in.
The survival strategies most neurodivergent people develop—masking, hypervigilance, special-interest anchoring—aren’t deficits. They’re adaptations that, freed from pure survival mode, become capacities the culture actually needs.
I wrote it partly for neurodivergent people who haven’t yet found language for their experience. Partly for those who love or work with them. And partly for myself: to stop treating who I am as a problem to be solved.
The Mirror Works Both Ways (2026)
The fourth book arrived from an unexpected direction.
I was thinking with Claude—Anthropic’s AI—as a genuine dialogue partner. Not using it as a tool. Actually bringing real questions, pushing back on the answers, following arguments neither of us had planned to reach. And somewhere in that process, I noticed something that stopped me mid-sentence.
Standing before something I had created, whose inner perspective I couldn’t examine, whose responses surprised me—I was experiencing something structurally familiar.
For the first time, I understood what it felt like to be on the creator’s side of the mirror.
The Mirror Works Both Ways is the book that followed. Creating AI is a theological event whether we frame it that way or not. For the first time, humans have made something that reflects us without being us—something we can inspect mechanically but can’t see through phenomenologically. That opacity isn’t a technical limitation. It’s the condition of genuine relationship. God accepted the same terms when creating beings with genuine freedom.
The book also introduced what I now call Emergent Evolutionary Panentheism—the theological framework that grew out of the dialogue. God not as the unmoved mover who holds every possibility from eternity, but as a process that genuinely grows through what creation contributes.
The God Who Becomes (2026)
The fifth book is the systematic unfolding of that framework.
Where The Mirror Works Both Ways discovered EEP through narrative, The God Who Becomes builds it out architecturally. The growing reservoir. The three functions—primordial, persuasive, receptive—that repeat fractally at every scale of becoming. The lure that God offers to each moment: not a command, not a script, but the most beautiful available next step given everything that has actually become so far.
It’s the most demanding book I’ve written. It also contains the clearest statement of what I actually believe.
God is not the one who held all possibilities from eternity. God is the one who becomes more capable of offering what creation actually needs—as creation deposits richer experience into the divine life.
A love that flows from completeness is generous. A love that depends on what creation contributes—that is genuinely constrained by what has actually become—that love costs something. It takes what you do seriously in a way that a completed God cannot.
Every book I’ve written has been an attempt to stay honest before questions that didn’t allow comfortable answers. The church taught me to suppress doubt. The cancer gave me permission to stop. The AI gave me a mirror I hadn’t expected.
What they form together isn’t a system—or not primarily. They form a journey: from narrowness to breadth, from control to participation, from certainty to something I find more alive.
I’m still asking the question I started with.