Daniel M. Harrell, Christian Author
Author Info:
A Southerner by birth and a New Englander by choice for most of his adult life, Daniel is now a Minnesotan by the will of God. He serves as Senior Minister of the Colonial Church in Edina, just outside Minneapolis (www.colonialchurch.org). Daniel has been a congregational minister for 25 years, having spent the past 23 at Park Street Church in downtown Boston. He loves to write, teach and preach—anything to make the Bible come alive in people’s lives. His fascination with Leviticus grows out of a realization that a Christian would have to be crazy to take it seriously. And yet it sits front and center in the Hebrew Torah and served as the backdrop for all of the New Testament’s teaching. He figured that the reason Christians don’t heed it is because Christians don’t really understand it. He figured that one way to get at its meaning might be to try it out. That project led to the book, How To Be Perfect: One Church’s Audacious Experiment In Living The Old Testament Book of Leviticus (FaithWords 2011).
As a developmental psychologist (PhD, Boston College, 1993) Daniel has also been fascinated by the intersection between faith and the brain, as well as faith and evolution. Convinced that physical reality and spiritual reality are intricately connected, he seeks to mine the rich was in which science correctly interpreted enhances and can be enhanced by theology correctly interpreted (the key condition being correctly interpreted). This interest resulted in the book Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith (Abingdon, 2008). You can also view Daniel’s contribution to this field at www.biologos.org.
A husband, father and lover of nature, he considers a day well spent if he can spend it with his family outdoors. In addition to a career as a minister, he has taught many courses on theology and psychology, has written for Christianity Today and The Christian Century, appeared on PBS’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. He blogs regularly for the Preachers’ Portal at patheos.com. He’s convinced that if God is the author of all that is true, then any pursuit of truth inevitably leads back to God. He holds degrees from the University of North Carolina Chapel-Hill and Gordon-Conwell Seminary. He currently lives in Minneapolis where he bikes, plays squash, shivers in the winter and avidly pines for another Red Sox world championship.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/danlharrell
