I am a theologian and a scholar of scriptural interpretation, husband to Christina and father to Ephrem and Geneva. I’m the author of Learning the Language of Scripture: Origen, Wisdom, and Exegesis (2021), and co-editor of Signs of Salvation: A Festschrift for Peter Ochs (2021). I’m currently writing a book on the Sabbath tentatively entitled Sabbath Meditations. I’m also the Children’s Minister at Christ Church + Washington Parish in Washington, DC.

My passion is to equip people to read the scriptures as a source of wisdom. The Bible frequently holds up wisdom as the highest human good and even identifies Jesus Christ with God’s own wisdom. Yet while Christians talk a lot about theology and politics, about what goes down on social media or the latest Netflix series to drop, we have little to say about what wisdom is and how we acquire it. I am convinced that if we read scripture without seeking wisdom, the Bible becomes only a mirror of our own narrowness and superficiality.

My scholarship focuses on how classical Christian and Jewish Biblical interpreters approached reading as an occasion for forming wisdom. My book on Origen’s hermeneutics shows how his bold and imaginative exegesis is integral to the process of acquiring wisdom by learning to speak the language of scripture. I edited a collection of essays about my teacher, the philosopher Peter Ochs, which includes my introduction (with Randi Rashkover) arguing that Ochs’s pragmatism is a contemporary renewal of the classical Jewish wisdom tradition. I also edit the Journal of Textual Reasoning, a journal of Jewish philosophy. I practice and train others in Scriptural Reasoning, a method of inter-faith scripture study.

I am represented by Keely Boeving at WordServe Literary.