About Me
My name is Brother Bede. While not my legal name, it serves as both a nod to the past and an aspiration for the future, reflecting my love of history and admiration for writers, artists, and thinkers who have used creative identities to explore ideas freely. For nearly fifteen years, I have worked in education as a teacher. After earning a B.A. in English in 2011 amid the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I worked as a substitute teacher by day and led digital-media programs for teenagers by night, experiences that revealed my vocation for education and demonstrated how historical forces shape ordinary lives.
I later worked in special education and coaching while completing an M.Ed. in Teaching and Learning with a concentration in history, receiving recognition as Special Education Teacher Assistant of the Year before teaching history in public, military, college-preparatory, and Christian schools. I was subsequently named Teacher of the Term in 2023–24 and Teacher of the Year in 2024–25. These experiences taught me that education should develop knowledge and skills while helping form character, purpose, and ultimately the soul.
As I pursue a Ph.D. in History, I continue studying culture, storytelling, memory, and the visible and unseen forces shaping human experience. This project brings together my vocations as a teacher, writer, historian, creator, and lifelong learner through articles, artwork, photography, video, historical interpretation, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. It is both a historical and artistic endeavor that explores the intersection of lived experience, culture, storytelling, and technology. It is also a field study intended to keep me from becoming an armchair historian, because history is encountered not only in books and archives but also through people, conversations, communities, landscapes, and everyday life. By living fully in the present, I hope to understand the past more deeply and approach the future with faith, hope, and love.
A Hidden Life
Culture, Community & Calling
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” — George Eliot
This quote reminds me that history is shaped not only by kings and queens but by ordinary people performing meaningful work, often without recognition. That belief guides how I teach, live, and approach this project under the name Brother Bede.
Known as the “Father of English History,” Bede preserved the story of early Anglo-Saxon England, its Christianization, and its kingdoms in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People while helping popularize the Anno Domini dating system. More than a chronicler, he helped create a shared English identity by uniting diverse peoples within a common Christian story and preserving the classical and religious knowledge that shaped Western civilization.
His example demonstrates that cultures are sustained not by technology alone but by shared stories, values, and traditions. I therefore hope to become a modern Brother Bede by honoring vocation and the quiet work of everyday people while preserving and interpreting my own age through history, books, film, art, current events, and community stories that reveal what is good, true, beautiful, and enduringly human.
Virtue & Vocation
The Pursuit of Happiness - On Purpose.
As the digital world continues to encroach upon our lives, the value of what is tangible, personal, and real only grows.
This is why I believe that: the future is physical.
Yes, I know it may sound contradictory to promote this vision through a website and social media. But I do not believe we need to abandon technology altogether. Instead, we need to restore balance by putting technology in its proper place as a tool, not a master, both in the
classroom and beyond.
Technology should not be abandoned but restored to its proper place as a tool rather than a master, because it can support human flourishing but never replace genuine relationships, meaningful work, community, moral formation, and lived experience. This vision echoes Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, which teaches that artificial intelligence must remain at the service of human dignity and challenges us to become active builders of a more humane world.
Crafting History puts that principle into practice by using technology to encourage deeper engagement with people, places, stories, and the physical world. I want to lead by example by meeting people face to face, working with my hands, trying unfamiliar things, learning through failure, and continuing to show up. When education is rooted in virtue and experience, we pass on more than information; we provide formation and help build something that lasts.
