Author: James Russell Lingerfelt

James Russell Lingerfelt is an award winning writer and documentary film maker. Raised on a farm in northeast Alabama, he spent the first twenty years of his life helping his dad and brother doctor cattle and maintain the family vegetable gardens. Lingerfelt was an average student in high school, yet excelled in literature, gravitating toward the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Lingerfelt majored in Psychology, and worked part-time on the college maintenance crew, scrubbing toilets and mopping floors. He also worked at his local home bank as a bookkeeper. Having a close relationship with his parents and older brother, he studied in-state, journeying to Auburn University where he and his brother were roommates. Lingerfelt wrote his first book as he left Auburn, titled, The Warrior of Ephes Dammim: When Teenagers Overcome their Giants. The book was written as a pamphlet to instruct teenagers on how to maintain their identity and integrity in high school. The writings were later discovered by a small literary press, and over a course of two years, became one of the highest selling books in the publishing company's history. The following year, when the publisher requested to run a second print of the book, Lingerfelt refused, saying he no longer agreed with most of the book's message. Lingerfelt attended graduate school at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. He majored in Classical Judaic and Christian Studies and volunteered as a counselor at Camp David Gonzales; a juvenile delinquent rehabilitation center. Writers and theologians who influenced his spiritual life were Jewish scholar Harold Kushner, Oxford scholar and Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright; the late Yale Chaplain Henri Nouwen; and anti-Nazi, Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. After completing his Masters, Lingerfelt spent a year in residence at Friends University in Kansas where he studied Patristics (Early Judeo-Christian Literature 100-500CE) and the works of St. Augustine.