E. Scott Jones's Blog

Our local NPR station KIOS has a new Sunday morning interview show in the spot once occupied by Krista Tippett's On Being. The show is entitled Lives and is hosted by my friend Stuart Chittenden. This last Sunday, they broadcast an interview of me that we pre-recorded back at the end of May. I talk about my faith, my coming out, the pandemic, being a dad, and my divorce and what lessons I've learned for living a good life. It was a fun interview and fun (and a little emotional too) to listen to it. Here's the link:

https://www.livesradioshow.com/episod...

“How did we ever live in Dallas without cell phones and GPS?” I asked Brittany Wooten as we sat together with Wootens and Keiths at a long table in the Bavarian Grill in Plano.

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “We use GPS everywhere we go now.”

I had found (and was to find) the GPS most helpful in deciding what to do to get around a slowdown in the heavy traffic.  No more need we guess whether to pull off and go another direction.

The Bavarian Grill appears in Open: A Memoir, so we simply had...

Saturday morning I was driving south from Oklahoma City headed toward Dallas for my next book event.  With few clouds, you could see a brilliant light blue sky, an almost perfect and mild day.  My first realization of the morning was that Oklahomans have a new relationship with speed.  I was going about 6 miles over the posted speed limit and that once would have meant I was the one zooming past most cars.  Not that day.  I was riding along peacefully in the right lane for most of the trip a...

Driving along the Will Rogers Turnpike on our way from Tulsa to my hometown of Miami, my preschool son required a potty break, so we exited the toll road at Big Cabin.  He didn’t want to get back on the interstate, so I said we could take the scenic route, driving the old highway through the small towns.  Which also meant a drive through family history.

Vinita–that’s where one grandpa lived at the end of his life.  Afton–that’s where another grandpa went to high school.  Then in Narcissa the...

On Thursday, October 18 I returned to my hometown of Miami, Oklahoma to sell and sign my book Open: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Sexuality in the Heartland.  For the first time I was doing a public event in my hometown as an out gay man.

I pulled up to the back entrance of Chapters, the local bookstore on Main Street.  Long ago public parking lots were built behind the stores on Main Street and those stores created back entrances.  When I was a kid this was the primary way most people visi...

Three articles appeared today about my book Open: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Sexuality in the Heartland.  

Writing in Tulsa’s Black Wall Street Times, Casey McLerran covered my Tuesday night reading and discussion at the Black Wall Street Gallery.  She wrote, “Jones’ humor and poise; which has carried him and his family through the tumultuous public and internal struggles of being an openly gay man; creates an ease around the politically and emotionally charged situations detailed in his...

“I want this gallery and the artists we present to show people coming together, working together, to make something new, something better,” said Dr. Ricco Wright in a Tulsa World article about the recent opening of the Black Wall Street Gallery in Tulsa’s Greenwood District.

I was honored for them to host last night’s book reading and signing.

My friend Shawn Crawford arranged everything.  Shawn and I met at the Yale Writer’s Conference in 2014, connecting because of our connections to Oklaho...

Today I got to meet Glennon Doyle.

Last year when it was announced she was going to be a keynote speaker at the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, I frankly was “Who’s that?”

But her presentation at Synod blew me away with its vulnerability, its honesty, its raw and relevant way of sharing the gospel.

So, I was excited with the Iowa Conference of the United Church of Christ announced she would be keynoting their annual meeting.  The Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota Conferences hav...

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day.

I came out to myself in 2003 and fully, publicly in 2005.  My memoir is my coming out story.

So, yesterday evening at our local progressive Christian bookstore, Urban Abbey, I did a National Coming Out Day book event.

I read a portion of my story about my struggle to reconcile my calling as a minister with my sexuality. Back in November 2003 I spent a day of private, spiritual retreat trying to decide what to do, but it was finally the airing of HBO’s A...

Back in February the Queer Omaha Archives Oral History Project housed at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections interviewed me.  The interview is available online here.