About Stephen

I write from inside the prayer, not about it

I am not a scholar. I am not a priest. I am a man who was taught the Prayer of the Heart by those to whom the tradition passed it for two thousand years, and who has said it enough times to know that the one who began is not the one still saying.

The books I have written are not commentaries. They walk the prayer. They sit with what happens when it is said. They trace the long survival of interior prayer through the centuries when it was quietly kept alive — by desert monks, by Russian peasants with no education, by writers and mothers and factory workers and old men dying alone.

A fourth book, on affliction and the peace of Christ, is in progress for 2027.

How I came to this work

Before the vocation to write surfaced, I spent more than twenty years as a government affairs consultant, working with clients at the federal, state, and local levels. It was also not the whole of the life that was asking to be lived.

In October 2024 I was baptized into Eastern Orthodox Christianity. My baptismal name is Porphyrios, given for St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia.

Nepsis Press

I publish under my own imprint. Nepsis is the Greek word for watchfulness — the interior attention the desert fathers named as the ground of the whole spiritual life. The press exists to publish contemplative and Orthodox Christian works, beginning with my own trilogy and continuing with whatever else is asked of it.

Contact

For correspondence, invitations, or permissions, please write here. I live in Salt Lake City.