Who I Am
My name is Sam, I’m married to Colette, and we live with our daughters Martha and Mabel in the South of England.
This is a place I share things that matter to me. Everything here is an expression of my desire to search out the truth, beauty and goodness of what the Creator has made. I am inspired by the examples of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and George Steiner; thinkers who refused the assumption of an impassable rift between imagination and reason, or the physical and the transcendent.
What I Do
I write poems, blog posts and longer essays. I also give occasional talks, particularly on the Bible. I do all of this with a deep desire to take seriously the complex realities of the human condition. My writing has been published by The Gospel Coalition and UCCF’s BeThinking website, The Cultivating Project, and Ekstasis Magazine. I am also as of 2021 a team member at The Cultivating Project, a community of writers and artists committed to pursuing spiritual maturity as Christians and growing in excellence in their artistic vocations.
Professionally, I started out as an academic in bio-engineering at the University of Southampton. My research used 4D imaging at large national facilities to understand very small biological systems. A record of my published research can be found here.
I am now a dual-qualified European and Chartered (UK) Patent Attorney, a role which mixes scientific and legal skills to help inventors and companies protect all kinds of inventions in the spheres of engineering, physics and computer science. I’ve written a bit about this career change here.
Outside of work, like to be in water. I also enjoy fiddling with music production, taking photographs, making videos, and making things with my hands.
What I Believe
Most fundamentally, I’m a follower of Jesus as he is revealed in the Bible. When really engaged on its own terms, the Bible grasps the knotty complexity of the human condition like no other account of life, the universe and everything.
The Biblical view of reality is often caricatured by those who have barely engaged with it, but what it presents is a true paradigm shift. It reveals a way of seeing our identity, our agency, our will, and our purpose which has roots far deeper than the bland individualism of Western late-Modernity, an individualism which ironically ends up in a form of homogeneity. The Bible presents ultimate truth not as a sterile fact, but as personal: incarnate in the person of Jesus.
Jesus’ death and resurrection grounds all that is good, true and beautiful somewhere other than the exhausting and demeaning relativism and self-determination of our secular age. We are fully known, with all our flaws and failures, and yet accepted: a paradigm of undeserved, sacrificial, other-centred love.
What This Site is For
In a world of fevered and polarised opinion, I want to stand in some small way for a different perspective: seeking synthesis and harmony across reason and imagination, enquiry and creativity; honesty and compassion; conviction and dialogue; truth and humility.
These is much more to say: what I do here is a way of slowly expanding on these issues as I wrestle with the complexity of life in this world.
I hope you enjoy looking at some of the things you find here. If anything particularly inspires or challenges you, or you want to enter into dialogue, please send me an email at samueldavidkeyes<<at>>gmail<<dot>>com.
