In this era of unprecedented division, hopelessness, distraction, and cynicism, we’ve lost the ability to recognize the goodness all around us. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
A Priest Walks Into a Waffle House: Stories From a Gritty, Grace-Filled Life will show what the prevailing culture doesn’t want you to know. That the world is actually brimful of overcoming, beauty, lovingkindness, and redemption–precisely amid the grit and suffering.
Through a collection of 90 little stories, this cheeky spiritual memoir will give the reader a ring-side view of the beautifully bizarre and equally gut-wrenching encounters that always present themselves to me. (Translation: I’ve seen the damnedest stuff.) I’m betting that my lived experience–and the meaning I’ve made of it–could be acutely relevant to this point in time.
After a supernatural knock upside the head at the Waffle House, I’m forced to rethink everything I believe and reflect on moments along my spiritual path. From becoming Hindu at the age of 13, in 1981, in Warner Robins, GA (let that settle in for a minute)–to mowing down a calf in the road while en route to the Encyclopedia of Hinduism fundraiser–the humor and heartbreak flow in equal measure.
The final, longer story in the book is “The Mayor of Happytown,” named after a moniker given to me by a reader. Written as a letter from the Mayor to her constituents and those interested in moving to the fictional Happytown, this chapter is an instruction manual on how to get to a place of personal peace, good cheer, and loving perspective.
Overall, I hope A Priest Walks Into a Waffle House is a bit of “story medicine” for the weary and whacked-out, the enraged and the anxious, and those who just want to relax with a book and laugh big. In other words, I want this book to make you feel better. Consider it a tonic composed of four elements: poignancy, comedy, grit, and joy. But also consider it a grenade lobbed at the neurotic, doom-scrolling caravan of despair we’re all trudging along in.
Ostensibly a story of my eventual, fitful, and comical conversion to Catholicism, A Priest Walks Into a Waffle House will aim to be more than that.
I pray it will be part tender meditation, part war cry, and a rollicking good time for readers of any or no faith.
A Priest Walks Into a Waffle House: Stories From a Gritty, Grace-Filled Life will be published in Fall 2026 by Mercer University Press.