Michael Esterheld is a writer, a semi-nomadic wanderer and troubadour with many years of experience in church music and music ministry, across traditions and denominations. He has, at one time or another, been an actor and a theatre teacher, a bartender and a gas station attendant, a photographer and a blogger, a secretary and a sailor. But through it all he has been a musician.

After earning his undergraduate degree in the Great Books liberal arts program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, he later completed an M.A. in Eastern Classics at the St. John’s College Graduate Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where his studies focused on the foundational religious, literary, and philosophical texts of India, China, and Japan.

He believes wholeheartedly in the power of songs and stories to inspire and bind us together, to bring down the walls that all too often separate and isolate us, to build stronger communities, and to keep us mindful of the fact that “the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).

Some of his occasional musings and “dispatches from the here and now” can be found on his website, UselessOldTree.com.