About Me and Ron’s Reflections
Many people have opinions on issues related to faith, politics, culture, and society, and I have some of my own to share. The question you’re currently pondering is, “Why should I follow this person’s opinion?” That’s fair; the volume of information in the public square is enormous, the quality is often suspect, and your time is valuable and limited. So let me introduce myself and why I’ve decided to write.
First, let me introduce myself.
I was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, into an Air Force family, and we traveled constantly, moving on average every two years before I turned 18. Those travels included six states and two foreign countries; I started kindergarten in Indiana, elementary school in Japan, middle school in New Mexico, high school in Spain, and graduated from high school in Texas. After brief stints at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Texas A&I University (now Texas A&M - Kingsville), I landed at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where I earned my bachelor’s degree in political science and my commission as an officer in the Air Force.
That is also where I met Annik, the love of my life, an applied linguistics student from France who spent a semester at Texas Tech on a study abroad and decided to come back to the States because of me. We were married on Bastille Day, July 14, 1984.
I spent nearly nine and a half years in the Air Force as an intelligence officer stationed in Nebraska, Germany, and Florida in the last years of the Cold War. While on active duty, I earned a master’s in international relations from Troy University and became a father. After my service, I worked as a defense contractor and information technology executive, moving from Florida to Germany and back to Florida. In 2001, I was appointed to the presidential administration of George W. Bush. I was a senior executive at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Small Business Administration.
I returned to the private sector and had a brief stint with the American Red Cross at their national headquarters. I ran for public office and lost, but remained active in Republican Party politics in Maryland and the DC metro area.
After being laid off multiple times as the economy wobbled, I eventually transitioned to the academy, serving as an associate, interim, and online dean at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, for over 11 years. I now serve as the vice president for online learning at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri. I work remotely from Forest, Virginia, where I live with my wife, a department chair for foreign languages at Liberty, and my middle daughter. My oldest child, a daughter, lives in Atlanta, and my youngest, a son, is married and lives about half an hour from our house.
A fun fact from my bio is that, in my lifetime to date, I have lived in 22 different locales!
Lake Charles, Louisiana
Fairbanks, Alaska
Anchorage, Alaska
Kokomo, Indiana
Tachikawa, Japan
Mountain Home, Idaho
Alamogordo, New Mexico
Encinar de los Reyes (Royal Oaks), Madrid, Spain
Abilene, Texas
West Point, New York
Kingsville, Texas
Lubbock, Texas
Aurora, Colorado
Omaha, Nebraska
Birkenfeld, Germany
Montgomery, Alabama
Melbourne, Florida
Aidlingen, Germany
Valrico, Florida
Huntingtown, Maryland
Lynchburg, Virginia
Forest, Virginia
I’m a Baby Boomer in my mid-60s but constantly learning and growing. If you read articles or the book I wrote a decade or more ago and compared them to what I write now, you wouldn’t believe it’s the same person. I am living proof that trials and the humility they produce open the mind and heart to reformed thinking. While I still consider myself a “conservative,” I am not by any means the political conservative I once was. If I had to choose a word to describe what I mean by “conservative,” it would be “prudent.” To my mind, there is an order in the universe, and what T.S. Elliot and conservative philosophers that followed him, like C.S. Lewis and Russell Kirk, called “the permanent things” that provide a foundation and a shelter from chaos. Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles” are pretty close to capturing the conservatism I embrace. You will see right away that it bears no resemblance to the authoritarian populism of today’s Republican Party, which used to be the political standard-bearer for conservative ideology but has since become a cult of personality and the vehicle for a form of right-wing nationalism that was previously more common to Europe than our shores.
That said, my transformation from GOP insider and political conservative to the practice of prudence is not the most significant change I made. I gave my life to Christ at the age of nine, but my faith journey has been a roller coaster ride, and at one point, I stopped practicing my faith altogether, eschewing church and the community of believers for over a decade. I came back to faith after a loss in my life and reclaimed Christ as my own rather than an heirloom passed down to me from my family. However, my return to faith was in an evangelical church, and over time, particularly as I became politically active, I began to mirror the amalgamation of faith and political influence ascending in the larger evangelical movement. It took another decade of personal trials and experiences with people outside my previous circles of influence to humble me, make me teachable, rid me of the political idolatry I was practicing, and reorder my faith to focus exclusively on Christ and His calling in my life.
So that is how I got here. I’ve written a great deal over the years about my experiences and observations, and I have always been complimented for my writing, so that is what encouraged me to begin this place of reflection on things that move me, thus the name “Ron’s Reflections.” With my eclectic background, I have a lot of thoughts about faith, politics, culture, and society, so I have no overarching theme other than what might inspire me from one week to the next. I hope I will always keep it engaging and worth the 15 minutes or less it takes you to read an article.
In my writing, I will attempt to follow the exhortations of the apostle Paul to the church at Corinth when he declared:
For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5, NIV).
In that chapter, Paul begins with an appeal to them “By the humility and gentleness of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:1). I mention that to say that if you come here for ammunition to start a fight, I promise you will be disappointed…maybe! I can’t anticipate how people will respond to my writing, but I am not out to “own” anyone. You can find that kind of residue anywhere on the web. If I can make people think rather than react to what stimulates their primal brain and do so “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15), I will feel like I’ve done something worthwhile. Whenever I read someone else’s work, I assess whether they intend to inform, inspire, or inflame. I hope to achieve the first two and avoid the last if it’s in my power.
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