About

Paul Cooke is completing Seminole Lovelight and Other Episodes from My Life in a Cult, a memoir detailing how he began to be cured of errors he embraced during his nine years as a member of a striking representative of the modern cult phenomenon–the Children of God.

After his departure from the group he sought to start over. First he worked as a  shipping and receiving clerk, next a salesman of children’s shoes while at the same time moonlighting as a newspaper reporter, and then finally as an apprentice furniture refinisher. He found such work gave him time to begin to recover from the things that had deceived him. Still, troubled by his ignorance, he decided to begin to remedy this a little by going back to college after having dropped out twelve years earlier.

After a decade of university studies and now with a doctorate in the history of political thought, he found a teaching post at the University of Houston. He offered courses in the political science department as well as in the university’s Honors College, where he taught undergraduates what are sometimes called “the Great Books.”  While there he also completed a book published by Roman and Littlefield entitled Hobbes and Christianity: Reassessing the Bible in Leviathan. At the University of Houston he served as founding director of the Houston Teachers Institute, a program to strengthen teachers and teaching in Houston’s inner-city public schools. There he grew to admire greatly a number of dedicated public school teachers. He is pictured nearby speaking to the Institute’s 2003 Convocation.

Cooke passed leadership of the Institute to others and moved to the Boston area in 2004 with his wife and daughter, where he began Great Books Tutoring. He spent time studying the Bible, attended classes at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and became involved in the congregation of a small evangelical church where his Christian faith was greatly encouraged.

In Massachusetts he began a work of fiction, The Longpoint Chronicles of Ida Pages and Her Friends, featuring the redoubtable Ida Pages, who seemed to come alive to him as he told her tale.

Short stories, essays, book reviews, excerpts from Ida Pages, as well as from the nearly completed memoir of his cult experience, are all found in these pages.