Announcing the Launch of Pauldavidcooke.com
Essays, Books, Stories, Blog Posts and Podcasts
At PaulDavidCooke.com are found selections from Seminole Lovelight and Other Episodes From My Life in a Cult–-the story of meeting the Children of God, how I spent nine years with the group and then rebelled against the influence of the man who led it. It’s a tale of delusion and disappointment, and yet also (perhaps surprisingly) one of hope for the human situation.
Here, too, are excerpts from The Life of Ida Pages and Her Friends, a novel set in Houston, Texas and Concord, Massachusetts, as well as book reviews, stories, blog posts and essays tied to these difficult days. And podcasts will be coming soon. I hope you’ll visit a bit and look around.
Four months after my conversion to Christianity at age nineteen, I joined the Children of God and was in the cult—for that’s what it turned out to be—throughout my twenties, leaving finally at age 29. A lot of my writing explores what that was all about. After leaving that in ’79 I then earned a bachelor’s degree in English and American Literature (Brown, 1984) and a doctorate in History of Political Thought at Harvard (1991), where I studied under Harvey Mansfield, Jr.
In 1993 I began to teach at the University of Houston, where I remained on the faculty until 2004, with appointments both in the Honors College and the Department of Political Science. There, too, I had a remarkable, six-year adventure serving as the founding director of the Houston Teachers Institute shortly after my book on the English thinker Thomas Hobbes and his treatment of religion, Hobbes and Christianity, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 1996.
Since 2004 I’ve lived in Boston and Houston and tutored young people in what is known as The Great Books, including works of Homer, Plato, Augustine and Shakespeare—and things like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and stories by authors ranging from Jack London to C.S. Lewis. Also since 2004, I began to write fiction; one of my stories is published here: “Overturning the Whole Apple Cart, Sort Of.” I hope you’ll enjoy it—and that you’ll even subscribe to my Newsletter which occasionally will contain more stories!
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