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Lawyer Trades Corporate Finance for Christian Fiction
Until recently, Pamela Binnings Ewen was a corporate finance partner with Baker Botts in Houston. Now, she lives in Mandeville, La., where she devotes herself full-time to a career writing what she calls "Christian literature with a twist." How she went from corporate lawyer to Christian writer is the subject of a profile of her this week by Anne Lautzenheiser published in The St. Tammany News.
Ewen's two most recent books, "The Moon in the Mango Tree" and "Walk Back the Cat," are fiction. But her start as an author came with a nonfiction exercise in using legal process to study the birth of Christianity.
She was still practicing law when she started writing her first book, "Faith on Trial," a nonfiction work in which the reader is invited to examine evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus. Ewen presents archaeological, scientific, historical, literary and even medical data in her analysis of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
An agnostic at the time, Ewen had set out to find answers to her own questions of faith. Her initial intention was not to publish her findings, only to apply the legal process to the story of the birth of Christianity. The resulting amount of information was so vast, however, and its effect on her so profound, she decided to turn it into a book.
That book has been used as a text on law and religion at Yale Law School and earned praise from, among others, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who called it "a superbly documented legal analysis." From there, she turned to novels, telling The St. Tammany News that she mines her personal history for inspiration. Her most recent book, for example, is based on diaries kept by her grandmother, an opera singer turned missionary's wife in 1920s Siam, now Thailand.
As for her decision to give up law, Ewen writes on her Web site that it was driven by a desire to search for deeper meaning in her life. "I realized that everything that I had accomplished as a lawyer was temporary -- interest rates go up or down, business deals are modified, people change, goals change. ... I decided to find the answer to the question: what is the purpose of life? Is this now all there really is?" We can only wonder what would come of things if every corporate finance lawyer asked the same question.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on November 7, 2008 at 11:47 AM | Permalink
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