About This Blog
“Writing can be a creative and invigorating way to make our lives available to ourselves and to others. We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told - we may discover that the better we tell our stories, the better we will want to live them.” -Henri Nouwen
The Why
We are Mike and Heidi Daniels, husband-and-wife team and original creators of The Unedited Life. As friends, lovers, writers, and followers of Christ, our hope is to write with raw honesty, authenticity, hope, reality, and vision.
The name of this blog portrays our hope for it. We desire to truly be unedited – we do not plan to “edit” our writing according to familial or societal expectations of what’s appropriate or according to what others think that we’re “supposed” to believe. In our writings about life, God, love, marriage, desire, fear, intimacy, church, and society, we home to approximate Harry Blamires description of what he calls “the thinker”:
The thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundation of all around him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance.
We hope to be a nuisance to the typical Christian establishment, challenging its communities to think rather than accept; to feel rather than to shut down; to live rather than survive. There are no sacred cows here at The Unedited Life – no topic that we won’t talk about, no cherished belief that’s above doubt and questioning. We invite you to join us in our journey. Dialogue and conversation are the most that we hope to inspire from this small corner of the web…so pull up a chair, grab a latte, and join us over in the comments section or the forum.
Who Are We? … The Pseudonyms
Copernicus:
Michael Daniels has chosen the nom de plume “Copernicus,” as an homage to one of history’s greatest thinkers and innovators. Nicolaus Copernicus was a student of the law, of the church, of the human body, and of the heavens. He was a lawyer, a teacher, a diplomat, an economist, a philosopher, a philanthropist, a warrior and a scientist. More than any of these, however, he was willing to challenge “common knowledge,” when it failed to line up to what his own eyes told him. In a time when new worlds were being discovered on this earth, he was exploring the mysteries beyond it. His magnum opus, “on the Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies,” published while he lay on his deathbed, forever changed the way humans perceived their place in the universe, and marked the way for Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to follow as they strove to explain the workings of worlds.
Of his choice of pen-names, Mike says, “Like Copernicus, I desire to challenge humanity’s “common perceptions.” Like him, I cannot accept that truth is a product of popular assent. do not care what your favorite author or philosopher says on a given topic. I care about what is true - and while, like Copernicus, I may have an incomplete picture of that truth, that will never stop me from searching for it.”
Boudicca:
Of her chosen pseudonym, Heidi says, “Boudicca was a matriarchal chieftainess of the Celtic Iceni tribe who stood up to the Romans as they attempted to conquer what is now Northeastern England. Perfectly willing to make peace when she could, she did not shrink from fighting back when forced to do so. In her quest she destroyed an entire Roman army, and very nearly extinguished the Roman presence in the British Isles. . . and what drove her was the very thing that drives me . . . the desire to protect that which is at the very center of one’s identity. For Boudicca, it was her people and their freedom. For me, it’s the hearts of those I love, and their freedom.”