About me

For better and worse, my Roman adventure came to an abrupt end on the feast of Epiphany, 2003, when I woke up incapacitated with searing pain throughout my body. After more than a month in a Roman hospital in excruciating suffering but still with no diagnosis, I was able to return to the States with the help of a kind religious sister and friend.  Not long thereafter, I was diagnosed with the chronic auto-immune disorder Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (also called SLE or just “lupus”).  Lupus affects everyone who has it a little differently. Flannery O’Connor died of it, for example. I would have died many times over by now if not for the medicines available today.

In any event, over the course of the years I eventually found my calling in family life and in service to Christ’s Church as a Catholic theologian. I thus went on to earn my M.A. at Franciscan University of Steubenville and a Ph.D. at Ave Maria University, during which time my wife and I courted and married. I finished my dissertation in 2009 while teaching Religious Studies at the University of Illinois before being hired at Benedictine College, which has been my home ever since.

As for living with lupus, well, it informs everything I do in one way or another.  It’s a both a tremendous cross but also an immense blessing. today I continue to deal constantly with problems that began decades ago–from hip replacements due to necrosis, to a retina that has detached multiple times (with eye surgeries that made me look like Rocky Balboa), to kidney failure that required a transplant made possible through the gift of a dear friend. The positive side of this is that I get to be sort of a bionic hybrid: I have artificial lenses in my eyes, a left hip of ceramic and metal, and an aortic heart valve made of space shuttle material, and someone else’s kidney:) By the grace of God, however, my condition does not generally prevent me from doing my day to day activities more or less how I wish. I can still wrestle with my children; what I can’t do anymore is run a 5k, catch fly balls, or dunk basketballs (let’s be honest–I could never do that).