Book Release Reflections from a Small-Town Kid

How my Nebraska hometown shaped my journey as a scholar

On October 8, my first book comes out. When people have asked me how I’m feeling about it, my first impulse has been to downplay things. At one level, I remind myself, it’s not that big of a deal. Millions of people have published a book; mine is another drop in the ocean.

But the truth is that, to me at least, it is a big deal. I’ve poured a major part of my life over the past decade into writing this book. Seeing it out in the world is the culmination of a dream I’ve chased through ups and downs, believing that this story, this history, needed to be told.

I shared some of those feelings when I got to see and hold a physical copy of my book for the first time:

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Along with feeling gratitude and joy (and many other emotions), the end of the book process has led me to reflect on the journey it took to get here. So many people have invested in me and shaped who I am. I can’t possibly thank or mention everyone, but I do want to highlight a few.

And I have to begin with my hometown.

I grew up in McCook, Nebraska. Population 8,000.

We knew we weren’t a big town, but we were bigger than most of the communities around us. We had a Walmart and a movie theater. A daily newspaper and several radio stations. A high school whose teams competed in Class B, the second-highest classification in the state.

There was something about McCook that always seemed to punch above its weight.

Located in the southwest corner of the state, we were the hometown of George Norris, the “fighting liberal” senator of the early twentieth century, and Ben Nelson, the governor of Nebraska when I was growing up in the 1990s. Two other Nebraska governors, Frank Morrison and Ralph Brooks, had roots in McCook. And Gene Budig, the last president of the American League, grew up in our town.

We also had a beautiful public golf course, Heritage Hills, ranked by Golf Digest as one of the 75 best public courses in America. And during a six-year stretch in the 2000s, our high school football team made it to five state championship games, winning two—usually against larger schools from Omaha and Lincoln.

True, we didn’t have much of a reputation for producing scholars and intellectuals. There was no university in town, just a community college. In my own family, I was a first-generation college student; no one before me had ever graduated with a bachelor’s degree.

Still, McCook provided the foundation for the historian and scholar that I became.

First, I had parents who loved to read. Books, magazines, and newspapers were a constant in our house. My dad, who worked full-time as a UPS driver while also pastoring Cornerstone Fellowship, a small nondenominational church, subscribed to a monthly Christian book club and to Christianity Today. My mom was constantly reading evangelical devotional texts: Oswald Chambers, A.W. Tozer, Watchman Nee.

I learned to love books and reading from my parents. It was not just about knowledge and intellect. I saw it as an essential part of my spiritual life.

I also came to see reading as a pathway to transformation and growth.

While most people in McCook were Christians of some sort, at Cornerstone Fellowship we thought we were a little different. We were born-again, speaking-in-tongues, tambourine-playing Christians.

We tended to see ourselves as more zealous than “nominal” believers. And one way we expressed this commitment was by avoiding secular, worldly activities. For the first decade of my life, we did not have a television, we rarely watched movies, and we avoided non-Christian music. Before my siblings and I could play outside after school (there were four of us then, and two more came later), we were required to write Bible verses in a loose-leaf notebook. Not only did we avoid Halloween, we also did not celebrate Christmas because of its supposedly pagan roots.

But reading books brought my parents to a different perspective, one more open to recognizing the good gift of God’s presence in the world. I remember Philip Yancey’s influence in particular, with his books like The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace. Some of the strict rules fell away (my parents even bought a Christmas tree for the house), while the passion for loving and following Jesus remained.

Speaking of “the world”: I had incredible public school teachers. One especially important teacher was Linda Crandall. She taught journalism and served as the advisor for the high school student newspaper, the Stampede.

It was rare to have a high school journalism teacher of her caliber in a town the size of McCook. But she invested in us, teaching us how to write, edit, report, create, and find our voice. She advocated for us; she made us believe that our words mattered. Under her watch, the Stampede won awards from the Nebraska High School Press Association and set a standard of excellence that students sought to meet. My first attempts at writing for a public audience came because of her.

And then there was the basketball court.

More than any other activity, basketball gave me a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction. It helped me feel like I belonged.

Even in my early years, when my family was deeply suspicious of secular activities, sports were an exception—they were one “worldly” cultural space that we could participate in and enjoy. On Saturdays in the fall we would visit my grandparents, Emory and Lucille, to watch Nebraska Cornhusker football; on summer evenings we stopped by to watch the Atlanta Braves. Nebraska basketball was rarely on television, but we would listen on the radio to the exploits of players whose names have been forgotten by most today, but who were childhood heroes to me: Eric Piatkowski, Tony Farmer, Bruce Chubick.

Recognizing my passion for basketball, in third grade my dad converted half of our backyard into a cement basketball court, with painted free-throw and three-point lines. After school, as soon as I wrote down my required Bible verses, I would run to the backyard and work on my game. I still have vivid memories of winter nights, the crunch of snow beneath my feet, as I shoveled the snow and ice off the cement court so that I could dribble, shoot, and dream.

My hoop dreams back then were simple. Forgot the NBA: I wanted to play for the local high school team, the McCook Bison.

A young coach named Joel Hueser had moved to town in the early 1990s and began building up a program, bringing energy and excitement for basketball in a community typically dominated by football.

I followed the Bison on the radio and went to games when I could, hoping that one day I would don the red-and-white jersey and play for Coach Hueser. The best part, I discovered as I got older, was that the coach I admired was an evangelical Christian, a leader in McCook’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA). He provided a model for what it looked like to compete as a Christian, for navigating the tensions I continually felt between being “in the world but not of it.”

As I entered high school, basketball became even more important in my life. My relationship with one of my best friends, Willie Williams, was forged through our shared obsession with the game. Beginning in ninth grade we spent countless hours in the gym working on our shot and our dribbling. We joined a summer basketball team. We played pickup hoops at the local YMCA

To my amazement, the work paid off. As a sophomore, I made the varsity team. As a junior, I was the second-leading scorer on a team that made it to the state tournament. I started getting interest from area colleges.

Meanwhile, Coach Hueser became a mentor both on the court and off. Through his influence, I began to think about the intersections between my identities as a Christian and an athlete. Although he left after my junior season for an opportunity at a bigger school, he remains a good friend today.

After high school I left McCook as well and moved to Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska. I ended up spending a couple years as a student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Then I transferred to a small Bible college, Grace University, were I played basketball and got my secondary education degree.

I fell in love, too—naturally, with a girl from McCook. After Bethany and I got married we made a home in Omaha, where I spent a few years teaching social studies before embarking on the journey to a PhD.

At the time, there was a part of me that thought I was leaving my small-town roots behind when I entered the world of academia. I would only realize with hindsight that much of who I would become as a scholar was all right there in McCook.

From my parents, there was the constant desire to read and learn, the idea that books had a spiritual purpose, that they really could transform a life.

From teachers like Ms. Crandall, there was the interest in writing, in telling true and meaningful stories about people’s lives and their place in the world.

And from Coach Hueser there was a realization that sports mattered in a deep way—that they were more than a game, that they could actually form and shape our characters, our minds, and our souls.

In a future post, I’ll write more about my experience in higher education, including my journey through a PhD program and my winding path towards completing a book.

None of that, however, would be possible without the love and support I first received in McCook.

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If you’re curious about my book and want to know more, I published two previews this past week. Thanks so much for your ongoing support!

• At Current, I use a recent revival led by Ohio State football players to preview the main ideas and themes of my book.

• For the Danforth Center’s newly re-launched Arc Magazine (formerly Religion & Politics), I published a book excerpt that looks at the Christian athlete response to the "sports revolution" of the 1960s/1970s.