C. Michael Stinson (Mike, to friends and family) is a Virginia native who completed his undergraduate degree at the College of William and Mary (philosophy and religion) before moving to Louisville, Kentucky with his wife Tanya for graduate school. He has an M.Div. (communications) from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, an M.A. (theology) from St. Leo University, and an M.S. (biology) and Ph.D. (environmental biology) from the University of Louisville. Mike and Tanya moved back to Virginia in 1995. They have three children.

Mike has been fascinated with birds since childhood. He is an active birder, and most of his field work in biology and many of his previous publications have related to ornithology, though he has also published articles on fish, crayfish, and ancient Greek drama, among other things. Besides birding, Mike spends various amounts of time hiking, climbing, caving, hunting, and fishing, and was recently certified as a scuba diver. He has found that each of these activities allows him to experience God’s creation in unique ways. He also reads a lot, drinks a lot of coffee, and loves to travel, especially to the western United States, Italy, and the American tropics.

Mike has been a college professor for more than 20 years, most of them at Southside Virginia Community College, in Keysville, Virginia, where he teaches biology, philosophy, and religion. In 2013 he was ordained to the permanent diaconate for the Catholic Diocese of Richmond and since then has served at St. George Catholic Church in Scottsville, Virginia, where many of the homilies in this volume were first preached.

From the Introduction:

“A word about my title. The first reading for the Memorial of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Priest and Doctor of the Church, is from Wisdom chapter 7. Verse 15 begins with the phrase, ‘Now God grant I speak suitably….’ On hearing this reading proclaimed at a Mass a few years ago, I immediately thought, ‘that’s what I’ve been trying to do during my first years of preaching as a deacon – speak suitably!!’”