User:Thomas Ormsby

Thomas Ormsby is a life-long writer, with hundreds of editorials, essays, film reviews and treatises to his name. His works have been published in numerous periodicals, or broadcast on half a dozen radio stations, from Spokane to Albuquerque (where he was raised through high school). In 1960, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and served on a submarine.

In 1964, he entered the University of New Mexico as a journalism major, and also worked on the campus newspaper as a columnist, theater critic and editor of the 1966 Mirage, the yearbook. Then, after two and half years there, he dropped out, and he, along with many thousands of young people his age, were swept away on an open-ended odyssey of truth-seeking and spiritual evolution. This journey took him to faith communities scattered throughout California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. He also spent ten months traveling around Europe. It was this contact with Christianity in Europe that awakened his desire to conduct historical research on how the faith spread from the Holy Land to other parts of the world.

Upon returning from Europe in 1972, he lived for another fifteen years in the bucolic settings of the Okanogan region of North Central Washington State, sharing 40 acres of meadowland with friends and farm animals, all of which provided the longest interlude of peace and quiet of his entire life.

But when computers, digital media and the Internet began to emerge in the late 80s, he decided to move to Ashland, Oregon, where he resumed his college studies, receiving a B.A. in 1987, simultaneously working as the on-air host for an evening classical music program on the NPR station on campus, and then moving on to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he wrote play synopses and conducted and transcribed interviews with playwrights. It was here that the first draft of For Christ’s Sake was written in 1990; but the project was shelved when he was offered a position with an art reference book publisher in San Francisco.

And after sixteen years working at various institutions in the Bay Area, including a four-year term as Secretary of St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco, he decided to return to his home base of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he now lives, semi-retired, writing, designing websites and producing digital paintings.

His work can be seen at: http://thomasormsby.com