Eric Simpson

Eric is available to speak on: Literature, Poetry, Peace… and more »

Additional Information: Website | Podcast | Huffington Post

Biography

Eric J. SimpsonEric Simpson first felt the call to write when he was a child and started the “Simpson’s Gazette” newspaper, a weekly compendium of family information, poetry, and neighborhood news, through which he also learned to type, design, format, collate information and content, use a copy machine and maintain a mailing list. This enterprise led to his involvement in writing for and editing a more mature monthly magazine in junior high school, titled “Inner Images”, which he continued to publish through 12th grade, soliciting the fiction, poetry and essays of other students.

Presently, Eric is a member of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, and he continues to fulfill his early ambition to work with printed material as an associate editor for their quarterly journal, “In Communion”.  He is an occasional contributor of content to the journal, too.

Eric also writes regularly for the Religion section of The Huffington Post, which is the most popular news blog in the world. His subjects vary from addressing social and moral issues to promoting an Orthodox Christian perspective in that venue.

Eric’s podcast, “Seeking Peace” on Ancient Faith Radio, addresses issues regarding peace, as well as numerous questions concerning how peace can be lived out in every area of life.

His poetry and short fiction has appeared in various small press magazines, including Megaera and soon forthcoming in The St. Katherine Review. His blog, Marginal Accretion, is a display of his ongoing work on essays, reflections, life, poetry and reviews.

Eric describes his childhood as a being marked by a “vaguely religious secularism” that changed when he was eighteen years old; he experienced a dramatic conversion to Christianity. He felt almost immediately that he was called to Protestant ministry. After spending eighteen months in a Protestant missionary organization called Youth with A Mission that included extended trips to Mexico and Guatemala, Eric attended Calvary Chapel Bible College for another two years where he earned a degree in theology. His intent was to become a Protestant/Charismatic/Reformed Calvinist pastor. Not long after graduating, however, he completely abandoned those objectives when he discovered the Orthodox Church, and was relieved to recognize almost immediately that he was not in fact called to a pastoral vocation.

After nearly two years of becoming familiar with the Church, Eric was joyfully received through baptism at the Protection of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church in Santa Rosa, California.

The father of three children, Eric and his wife Jennifer live in southern Oregon, where he enjoys the natural environment, engages in the artistry and work of square foot gardening as helper to his wife, attends children’s soccer and basketball games, and finds himself often in the city of Ashland, where he also attends Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church.

Topics

Some of the topics that Eric is available to speak on include subjects such as literature, poetry, peace and the Beatitudes. His style is an attempt to integrate the power of story with reflective insights on themes that are pertinent to his listeners. As a result, he speaks personally, tells stories, references the lives of saints and others, quotes poetry and relevant fathers, alludes to both classic as well as contemporary fiction, tackles universal themes, and strives to communicate in a compelling, interesting and moving way.

Topics are variations on the following themes:

• Why Fiction and Imagination Matter
• Poetry, Prayer and Peacemaking
• What Peace Is, Isn’t and a Story of Reconciliation
• Doubt, Faith and Certainty in Christian Experience
• Orthodoxy and Fatherhood
• Conversion and the Crisis of Identity
• The Beatitudes as a Ladder of Virtues
• Poverty of Spirit in A Culture of Crass Virtues
• Meekness and our Relationship to Matter and Ecology
• True Christian Mourning and the Meaning of Death