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About the Author

Bill and Jacki Dahl make their home in central Oregon. They have 4 children and three grandchildren. They have four adopted Greyhounds, Dollar, Folsom, Riker and Boonie, as well as one Black Lab, and Reggie,  who accompanies Bill everywhere (all five would be terribly disappointed if they weren’t mentioned here). Bill & Jacki are typically involved in serving in their community.

Bill reviews pre-publication manuscripts, about-to-be-released and early release books for publishers, literary PR firms, and authors in the arenas of faith and culture, economics, and contemporary social issues. He does so gratis. These publishers include (but are not limited to) Jossey-Bass – A Wiley Imprint (San Francisco), John Wiley & Sons (NY), HarperOne – An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers (San Francisco), Zondervan Publishers (Grand Rapids, MI), Tyndale House Publishers, Thomas-Nelson Publishers and Bloomberg.

Jacki is an interior designer and graphics artist. Bill is a freelance writer , current events commentator and social justice advocate. He has extensive public speaking experience and has led seminars throughout the United States.  He is published in numerous professional publications, journals, magazines, e-zines, websites, newspapers and newsletters.    Jacki is composed gentle, caring, creative, fun-loving and contemplative. Bill loves people, life, learning, joy, listening, encouraging, visioning and mediating controversy and conflict. Bill and Jacki have lived in Seattle and Los Angeles, prior to making their home in central Oregon. They enjoy creating dialogue in a world gone different.

Bill is an ongoing contributor to the faith, culture and economics  dialog from a public policy and scoial justice standpoint. He has been characterized as a gifted story teller. He is the author of The Porpoise Diving Life – Reality For The Rest of Us – Picking Up Where Purpose-Driven Peters Out. The website and monthly ezine by the same name have thousands of subscribed readers in over 180 different countries. The audio book was released in November 2007. The book has received endorsements from well-known, progressive, national, leaders in the faith & culture arena including theologians Brian McLaren and Tony Jones, Jim Henderson , author Jim Palmer and others.

His writings have been published in Naked Capitalism, Seeking Alpha, The Audacity of Help, The Economic Roadmap, The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought & Practice, U.S. Catholic Magazine, Spirituality For Today and Plain Truth Magazine-Christianity Without The Religion to name a few. His poems, book reviews and articles about faith and culture and/or social justice are frequently featured on Amazon, Theooze.com, Next-Wave, Emergent Village and Ginkworld.  More recently, Mr. Dahl authored a chapter in a new book (published November 19, 2007) entitled, Out of the Ooze – Unlikely Love Letters To The Church From Beyond The Pew, published by NavPress. He has interviewed many authors including New York Times # 1 Bestselling author William P. ‘Paul” Young – author of The Shack – Where Tragedy Meets Eternity in front of a live audience.

At present, he is writing two new books – stay tuned.

Our take on it:

Let’s face it. There’s stuff in life that hurts, is frightening, incredibly joyous, unpredictable, humorous, tedious, boring, hazy and confounds our ability to understand it all. There’s even more about daily living on this planet that escapes trite, formulaic explanations. Let’s be honest. Life gets confusing and overwhelming. When my life gets this way, I go for a long walk on the beach. It’s what happened to me during one of these walks that prompted me to writea book and create a website. It’s about the reality for the rest of us, picking up where the purpose-driven perspective  peters out. It’s The Porpoise Diving Life.

We believe that God is alive and has more to reveal to us, His children. To do so, God is empowering people to breakdown the walls of the boxes man has attempted to confine Him in. God cannot be contained.

We yearn to be become God’s healing hands and feet: “It is time that we demand more of ourselves as Christians.  We are the hands and feet of Jesus Christ, and if the world is going to see, feel, and touch him, it will have to be through us.”(1)

We believe that God is empowering us to embrace those the world rejects, demeans and belittles. He is encouraging us to move and live outside the camp: “If our theology is to be an authentic reflection and witness to God who is revealed in Jesus Christ as the God of the excluded, then we need to embark on the often painful journey to meet with  Jesus the Christ outside the camp, among the excluded. Such a journey will leave us uncomfortable and displaced in the “carnivalesque” postmodem world.”(2)

We are people who are being led by God to jump the curve where “”Jumping the Curve” means leaving one stage of development for another….it involves leaving the comfort and familiarity of the old world of conventional wisdom, processes, traditions, leadership styles and products…..If that were not intimidating enough, those who do jump will find that the next curve does not even exist yet. In fact, it is being created by the leaders who are in the very process of guiding their organizations through “midair” gap between today’s fading epoch and the demands of the new era that is still unsettled and in evolution”(3)

Bibliography

1  Perkins, John M.  Restoring At-Risk Communities – Doing It Together & Doing It Right, Baker Books Grand Rapids, Michigan © Copyright 1995 by John M. Perkins, p. 12

2  Rieger, Joerg Opting For The Margins – Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, Oxford University Press, NY, NY © 2003 by The American Academy of Religion, p. 59.

3 Imparato, Nicholas and Harari, Oren Jumping The Curve: Innovation and Stratgic Choice in an Age of Transition. Jossey-Bass Publishers, Copyright (c) 1996 by Nicholas Imparato and Oren Harari. P. 74.