Brothers
and Sisters in Christ,
The
written works contained herein span
that time in my life from when I first
encountered Jesus Christ until the
present. The story of this
initial encounter is related here, in
a feature entitled "Is Anybody
There?"
Anyone interested in knowing me will
find pretty much my entire story in
the works linked below, and I post
this material here because so much of
it forms the experiential basis for
Radio New Jerusalem.
The
earliest works are a series of essays
addressed to McCormick Theological
Seminary, an institution now as then
dedicated to training men and
women for service in ministry within
and without the Presbyterian
Church. These pieces were
written prior to my departure from the
seminary near the end of my first
semester in the fall of 1977.
They represent that time in which my
faith was finding its voice after
years of wandering in the wilderness
of unbelief, and the fact that these
works seem to hold up so well after
all of this time is testimony to the
Spirit which infused them rather than
to my talent as a writer.
Indeed, what tumbled out of my old
Underwood typewriter back then
surprises me as much today as it did
in those halcyon days of faith when I
first wrote it.
The
next nearly quarter century is a
largely silent time in which my wife,
Jean, and I were busy at the tasks at
hand that raising seven daughters
entailed. During this time, we
purchased and restored an old
farmstead and built a vacation rental
management business in Leelanau
County, Michigan. We operated
this business very successfully until
we sold it and our home in 2003.
This was a very formative time in our
lives, and it was in these years that
we turned our attention skyward during
the long, winter nights and began to
listen earnestly and seriously to the
prophetic Christian programming that
filled the shortwave frequencies back
in those days. To encourage
others to listen, we built a hobby
business around restoring old tube era
radios and communication receivers,
and this was when I first dreamed of
hosting and broadcasting a program of
my own. The events of September 11,
2001 rekindled a prophetic urge I
hadn't felt since my seminary days,
and I wrote a series of short essays
that expressed the emotions of that
time. I wrote a few other things
thereafter, mostly pertaining to
Christian shortwave radio.
In 2002, a deeply profound
personal crisis led Jean and I in
search of a deeper relationship with
Christ in the Catholic Faith, and both
Our Lord and Our Lady, the Blessed
Virgin Mary, came to reveal themselves
in our lives and send us in a new
direction. It was during this time
that we felt called to sell our
business in Michigan, and we used the
proceeds to finance the Santa Rosa
Hotel in Sebring, Florida. We
operated the Santa Rosa for exactly
one year until it was destroyed by
Hurricane Jeanne in the fall of
2004. Subsequently, we ended up
moving back to my hometown of Alma,
Michigan in 2005, where we established
a more humble, but also more
spiritually fulfilling life, in which
we were called to Catholic ministry:
Jean to the elderly and me to the
incarcerated as a jail chaplain.
We also felt called to redevelop the
Radio New Jerusalem web site,
originally dedicated to global
Christian shortwave radio and our
radio restoration business, into a
Catholic news portal and information
web site. In the fall of 2012,
my old friend and Catholic brother,
Jack Quirk, founded Christian
Democracy,
an online magazine dedicated to
injecting Catholic Social Teaching
into the American political discourse,
and I wrote a monthly prophecy column
for this publication under the heading
"Camel's
Hair
and Locusts."
I ended this column when we began
preparations for the latest transition
in our life, which has brought us to
Safety Harbor, Florida. The bulk
of what is posted here to date comes
from this time in Alma, and is
comprised of reflections, essays,
articles and columns written as
inspired or as needed for the various
ministries and projects of this last
decade.
In the
months leading up to the presidential
election of 2016, I reprised "Camel's
Hair and Lousts" and found the leftist
slant of Christian
Democracy, and my role as the
token conservative on political and
religious issues, something neither
Jack Quirk nor I could deal with
effectively. As the core issue
of the election was more and more
revealed, at least to me, to be the
struggle of a nation seeking to
reclaim its very soul in the 11th hour
of a diabolic and sinister leftist
possession, I responded with a
rekindled love of country, and a new
found desire to speak to the leftist
inspired propaganda leading into ruin
both Church and State. I
addressed this in some detail in an
essay titled, What is Truth?
Since that time, the few pieces I have
written have been so inspired, and
have spoken to the issue of a
mainstream media turned leftist
propaganda service, and to the quest
for freedom of expression, and truth,
in the believing Catholic and
patriotic American alternative
media. Now that we have settled
more permanently in Clearwater, I hope
to publish more pieces in this vein,
with the hope that this may serve to
better illuminate the news as reported
on Radio New Jerusalem.
Overall, the writings collected here
represent a faith journey; a work
still in progress. As such, they
may not all necessarily represent
exactly where I am now, but they tell
the story of where I have been and how
I got from there to here. What I
wrote at certain times is, perhaps,
not what I would write now, but it is
what it is and I stand by it. In
reality, the goal is to point to Jesus
Christ, and where I have accomplished
this is where these works
succeed. For where they
fail, I beg your indulgence and His
forgiveness.
Yours
in Him,
Chaplain Phil
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