About Merlin

Merlin Quiggle has been a communicator — writer, photographer, editor, producer/director, creative director, marketing VP, and owner — for most of his life.

In high school, he was a reporter-photographer for the daily newspaper in his home town of Fairmont, Minnesota. He attended a Christian college in Missouri for a year, then transferred to the University of Minnesota, where he studied journalism and worked as a photography “stringer” for UPI (one of his shots made it into TIME magazine). He also was the sports editor for a weekly newspaper in suburban Minneapolis.

He served three years in the U.S. Army, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to become a Bulgarian Linguist; he then was trained as a Combat Interrogator and was posted to a Military Intelligence company at Fort Meade, Maryland.

After his (honorable) discharge, he attended North Central Bible College (now North Central University), earning a degree in Pastoral Studies.

In the following years, he worked in Minneapolis as the General Manager of a graphics company, as a “creative” for several advertising agencies, and as the owner of his own communications company. For a dozen years, he created and produced a series of “testimonial” advertisements in national magazines on behalf of a leading evangelical seminary.

While he has worked for both secular and ecclesiastical clients, his emphasis was always on projects for the church and its various arms. After serving as a communications vendor for a Christian university in the Pacific Northwest, he moved there to serve full time. For more than a decade, he was executive director of communications and then the marketing VP.

Most recently, he has worked as a creative consultant, as a speaker, and as a photographer/videographer. The majority of his time, however, has been invested in studying and writing a book on The Lord’s Prayer. He claims that it is “the best book I’ve ever written,” but full disclosure requires the admission that it’s the only book he has ever written.

Merlin has never married, despite suggesting that possibility to more than one woman. Nor does he have any children (see previous sentence).

His favorite authors include Christopher J. H. Wright (The Mission of God), N. T. Wright (How God Became King), Fleming Rutledge (The Bible and The New York Times), Timothy Keller (The Meaning of Marriage), Eugene Peterson (The Pastor), Robert Farrar Capon (The Supper of the Lamb), James K. A. Smith (Desiring the Kingdom), Bill Bryson (At Home), John Sandford (any of the “Prey” novels with Lucas Davenport), and C. S. Lewis (“The Efficacy of Prayer,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, which, he notes, “has shaped my understanding of prayer”).

His favorite passage of scripture is Matthew 6:5-15.