About Me

Hi. I’m John. I’m  married, 54 years old, and live in San Diego, CA. The books I’ve authored are in the column on the right. I’ve been writing this blog since April 2007.

I’m a Christian who believes that a great deal about how Christianity is practiced and perceived needs to change. (I wasn’t always a Christian; at 38, out of freakin’ nowhere, I had a sudden conversion experience.) I don’t believe, for instance, that homosexuality is in and of itself an offense against God, so I’ve done a fair amount of writing about that. (My work on that particular matter has been featured / excerpted on Savage Love (Dan Savage’s blog), Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, Advocate, GLAAD, Joe. By. God, LGBTQ Nation, Believe Out Loud, Truth Wins Out, The New Civil Rights Movement, Good As You, Towleroad, Box Turtle Bulletin, The Center for Progressive Christianity, The Progressive Christian Alliance, The Christian Left, Crosswalk.com, Christianity.com, The Christian Post and others.)

I founded and wrote the 16-point tenets which gave rise to the movement Unfundamentalist Christians.

I write for The Huffington Post.

I wrote and produced (via xtranormal) eight episodes of The Smith Family Chronicles, which tells the story of what happens when young Jane Smith comes out to her evangelical Christian family.

The Progressive Christian Alliance has ordained me  as a pastor.

If you’d like to invite me to speak, contact me here. For a bit more about my speaking, see here.

Here are a few things others have been kind enough to say about my work:

“John Shore is America’s preeminent non-douchey Christian. His blog is a must-read for anyone, Christian or otherwise.” — Dan Savage, Savage Love, founder of the It Gets Better Project.

“John Shore is awesome, and a brilliant writer. The minute I started reading his stuff, I knew he was a brother from another mother.” — Rob Bell, author of Love Wins, Sex God, and Velvet Elvis.

“John Shore is a gadfly, calling the Christian Church everywhere to act the way it says it believes about love and justice, which of course makes him an uncomfortable presence in those churches that do not like to be forced to face reality. So were the prophets of old. So was Jesus of Nazareth.” — John Shelby Spong. author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and others.

“John Shore helps me un-learn something I shouldn’t have learned in seminary, which is that there’s a dichotomy between being pastoral and being prophetic. Watching him consistently do both of those at once reminds me that, yes, being pastoral to the victims and prophetic to those who have hurt them is how it ought to be. I’m a big fan and beneficiary of John’s writing.” Fred Clark, a.k.a. Slacktivist.

“John Shore is funny as hell and smart as hell, which is good because I’ve heard that we’re both going to spend a long time there.” — Tony Jones, Theoblogy.

“John Shore’s unique, honest, and passionate writings draw us to dig a little deeper, to listen with the intention of truly hearing and understanding each other. He gives voice to those without a platform; he puts into words our latent questions/ observations about today’s topics that are begging to be addressed from the viewpoint of an informed Christian”– Spencer Burke, founder of TheOOZE.com

“Shore is a humorist whose work is more comedic than Donald Miller, and his appeal to Christians is more direct.”– Michael Spencer, a.k.a. The Internet Monk, author of the bestseller Mere Churchianity.

“John Shore is a remarkably gifted writer who knows exactly what he is doing.” — Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), Twelve Times Blessed and The Breakdown Lane.

“John Shore is one of those rare writers who can make people laugh and think at the same time. He’s one of the most talented, funny, and deeply thoughtful writers I know. He’s a sincere pleasure to read.”— Richard Louv, author of international bestsellers Last Child in the Woods, and The Nature Principle.

“John Shore, the legitimate son of Kurt Vonnegut and Dave Barry, writes with a freaky energy and humor and imagination that illuminate his characters’ and readers’ hearts. He’s the real thing.”— Richard Lederer, author of more than thirty books on the English language, including the bestselling Anguished English series and The Miracle of Language.

“Shore is a madman and a genius.”— Eric Metaxas, author of bestsellers Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, and, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, the Christian Booksellers Association 2011 Book of the Year.

“John Shore is a genius.” — Stephen Arterburn, author of the the bestselling Every Man’s Battle; host of the nationally syndicated radio program New Life Live.

And here’s some basic bio stuff about me:

Before I started writing books and blogging, I worked as an editor and/or writer for (among others) San Diego Magazine, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The San Diego Reader (the third largest alternative weekly newspaper in America), and San Diego’s KPBS (one of the largest public broadcasting companies in the country; I was managing editor of their subscriber’s magazine, On Air). I was also founding editor of D-Town 92101, a weekly tabloid newspaper covering downtown San Diego, and of Downtown, a glossy magazine covering the same. I have written extensively for such websites as E!Online, Microsoft’s (now defunct) San Diego Sidewalk and AOL’s Digital City San Diego. I’ve also published fifteen short stories in little literary magazines all over the country—including the front story (The Story of My Life) in Central Park, a New York literary magazine then edited by Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues).

Before that I spent four years at a large university taking classes in nothing but English, history, and philosophy.

Before that I worked as (among other things): a recreation leader, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman (I never sold one set), shoe salesman (good at selling shoes that people already wanted; awful at selling job-securing purses and socks I was supposed to inspire them to want), pizza “chef,” 7-11 clerk (graveyard shift at the most-robbed 7-11 in northern California!), shipper-and-receiver, Taco Bell miscreant, nanny, Macy’s stock boy, truck-loading Teamster, janitor, bookstore clerk, data input drone, Trader Joe’s “shipmate,” Jiffy Lube monkey, law office flunky, and church relations manager for a Rescue Mission.

I grew up (well, I got older) in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Cupertino, California, which, when I was a kid, was mostly orchards and tract homes, but later became the very heart of Silicon Valley. Talk about your little town disappearing.

I have been married thirty years to a woman who gives whole new meaning to the word “patient.” Catherine is by far and away the smartest, kindest, funniest, wisest person I’ve ever met. About one hundred times a day she freaks me out with her Giant Brain and infinite capacity for love.

This photo’s from The Burning of the Resentments.