Hi, I’m Brian Dant.
I’m a software engineer and a student of theology.
For the past decade or so, I've been working as a engineer building web applications. I worked first for "Startup Institute." I then had a short stint with an excellent company called CoUrbanize, located in Cambridge, MA (https://www.courbanize.com/). But then I decided to study theology on the side in Vancouver, B.C., which meant that I could not stay with my friends at CoUrbanize. I joined Appsembler, a fully-distributed (but with a lot of Boston folks) startup. We build EdTech software, and I'm a Staff Engineer there. I'm the technical lead for our “Virtual Labs” (AVL) product. See the AVL page at appsembler.com. AVL is a classroom in the cloud, where each student gets a fresh machine with the requisite stack. Appsembler is the best team around, I'm sure. You should work with us.
Recently I've been working on the next generation of our virtual labs product, including a "universal lab launcher," which will allow our customers to embed this lab-launching widget more easily onto non-LMS ("learning management systems") sites. The idea is to launch a Docker container or VM with your software installed from anywhere that JavaScript runs, more or less. I've recently moved this (somewhat complex) architechture to zero-downtime deployments, doing so with Ansible. And we've got some exciting stuff going on around the next generation of our backend, which I'm leading and will allow us to launch more complex software, and to launch it to multiple clouds.
In my other life, I study theology. I wrote a thesis at the end of my MA (2018) on the 16th-century Spanish mystic-theologian John of the Cross. I explored his use of the spiritual senses. This project arose out of my desire to know what it means to say that we “know” God. If you’re into reading a master's thesis, I can send you a copy via email. I wrote that thesis with Rev. Dr. Hans Boersma, who is a great theologian and a great supervisor. See his about page here. He’s now at Nashotah House in Wisconsin.
I’m now enrolled in a ThM at Regent, studying with Jens Zimmermann (see his about page). We’re reading Maximus the Confessor, a theologian-monk with a grand vision of reality. I’m looking at spiritual perception of revelation in Maximus’s work, and I've been dabbling with Michel Henry and others from the Continental tradition.
Regent College is a great place to pursue God through theological education. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions about Regent.
I'm the Associate Director for the Institute for the Renewal of Christian Catechesis, an organization that serves the church by promoting biblical, historical, and theological approaches to catechesis. We host an annual conference for pastors and theologians to discuss catechesis, serve as a networking hub, and publish articles on catechesis from our fellows. I've been helping with this project for a few years, and became the AD in 2021.
I have a personal newsletter, which I'd love to send to you:
This is a “now” page, which is supposed to be about what’s happened over the last year or so, though my list goes beyond that:
I wrote several essays for my ThM and MATS. If you want to talk about any of these people, I’d love to chat. I’m dying for theological buddies at the moment. I wrote on Pseudo Dionysius, The Cloud of Unknowing, Saint Catherine of Sienna, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Augustine, Saint Maximus the Confessor, Saint Gregory Palamas, and Martin Heidegger. I'm currently reading and writing on Michel Henry and Maximus.
I wrote a few book reviews as a student:
- On Veronica Mary Rolf’s An Explorer's Guide to Julian of Norwich
- On Rev. Dr. Demetrios Harper’s excellent The Analogy of Love: St. Maximus the Confessor and the Foundation of Ethics
- On Gerald McDermott’s Everyday Glory
- Up next: Darren Sarisky, Reading the Bible Theologically
I’ve started “micro blogging,” which is like Twitter but with less, you know, Twitter. https://briandant.micro.blog/.