About

Charles Strohmer is the author of seven books, one co-authored with John R. Peck. He publishes articles on various topics for religious and secular magazines, journals, newspapers, and Webzines and has written for the BBC on American government and Christian religion. He has spoken at venues in North America, Britain, and Europe and participated in radio and television interviews in the U.S. and U.K.

He has also worked as a freelance editor for a variety of publishers on dozens of book projects, one of which won a Gold Medallion Award and another was a runner-up. In 1998, he founded Openings, a quarterly “little magazine,” which is currently on sabbatical. He has contributed book chapters to the Dictionary of Contemporary Religion in the Western World and A Guide to New Religious Movements, and his book The Gospel and the New Spiritual is required reading at Covenant Theological Seminary. Known for making complex issues accessible to general audiences, he is currently writing a book about U.S. – Middle East relations.

Charles grew up in the American Midwest but later lived for three years in Britain, where his wife, Linda, co-founded a preschool. In America, after pursuing careers in the automotive field, radio broadcasting, and traveling as a stage manager for a heavy metal band, he tried his hand at writing and in 1986 signed a contact for his first book, What Your Horoscope Doesn’t Tell You, which went through additional printings and was translated into several languages. Publication of the book in the States coincided with his move to the U.K., where the book was picked up by a British publisher.

“When I returned to the States in 1989, I continued to write,” he recalls. “When people today ask me about those early years, they’re stunned when I explain that I wrote early drafts of my first few books in spiral notebooks and then used a typewriter for later drafts. I loved that creative process so much that I put off using a computer for as long as I could. It was of course work in those early years, but time seemed to stop for me when I wrote, still does. To save time, I developed my own shorthand in those notebooks, some of which I still use today.”

During the 1990s, Charles increasingly focused his work on the relevance of ideas, principles, and norms of the historic wisdom tradition to advance wisdom-based approaches in areas where human diversity is normative, cooperation essential, and human flourishing is desired, such as within education, the business world, family and social life, environmental stewardship, government responsibility, and especially the arts, communication, and intercultural initiatives. In 1996, he teamed up on a major book with British philosopher and theologian John Peck, a co-founder of the Greenbelt Festival and of College House (Cambridge). The two had previously collaborated on various projects that promoted a wisdom-based way of reasoning for contemporary life and work. In 2001, their book, Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, was published in Britain by SPCK.

“Shortly after the Twin Towers collapsed, I began research into a wisdom-based approach to international relations,” he recalls. “I used to notice this ‘lost’ narrative in the wisdom literature when studying it in other areas relevant to what i was I was teaching and writing at the time. So I would make notes about this lost aspect of the tradition but never went beyond that. Until things changed. I was aboard a Delta Airlines fight from London to Atlanta the morning of 9/11. We were diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we became guests of Canada for four days – and well-looked-after, I must say. (Read the story here.) Back home, I began a research project to explore the international relations dimension of the wisdom literature to see what relevance it might have for post-9/11 situations. I rather naively thought that it might entail a year or so of my time. Was I wrong! But I wanted to get it right, and I felt compelled to keep going. Eventually, ever-learning, I began to see the wisdom tradition’s potential for building more cooperatively peaceable U.S. – Mideast relations. Quite naturally, then, this grew into The Wisdom Project.”

By 2003, specialists in international relations and foreign policy were becoming interested and Charles began traveling to Washington DC and outlining ideas for new book wisdom-based U.S. – Mideast relations. Two years later, now a visiting research fellow of the Center for Public Justice (an independent, nonpartisan think tank), Charles was able to pursue The Wisdom Project more formally. Over the years he has given a number of talks on various aspects of his research and spoken with a variety of foreign policy specialists and officials, including conversations with some senior advisors in the U.S. and Britain.

“The tough problem of U.S. – Middle East relations, as everyone knows, is the rough intersection of the secular and the religious,” Strohmer notes. “As I have presented my research on wisdom and international relations to both religious and secular actors in the field, I have become increasingly convinced that a wisdom-based way of reasoning is uniquely suited to help national leaders and their foreign policy teams to negotiate that rough intersection more cooperatively. I believe this wisdom-based way of reasoning needs to be recovered and practiced. This is the central aim of The Wisdom Project and the new book I’m writing.”

Although currently absorbed in researching and writing the new book, he writes for various publications and travels speaking. He and his wife, an award-winning first grace teacher in the public school system, now make their home near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.