Ryan G. Butzman

I am a Midwesterner at heart, and I currently live in Northcentral Illinois with my wife Cynthia. I serve as the president of a small OEM manufacturing company, although I graduated with a fine arts degree from a liberal arts college.  Go figure, my path in life has been "unconventional."  When it comes to talking about our children, I will forever want to say we have two, but the reality is that we only have one now.  Our son Noah lives in Huntsville, AL and works as an aerospace engineer for Amentum, a NASA contractor.  We lost our beautiful daughter Mayah to a tragic car crash in October of 2024, a day that forever changed us and the way we see the world.  We have four extraordinarily spoiled dogs, and two cats who are always underfoot.  Needless to say, we go through vacuum cleaners on a regular basis.

It seems I have spent my entire life searching the darkness for truth and meaning.  I had a strong inclination towards the spiritual at an early age, and I have often felt like a social misfit in our materialistic society, particularly as a kid growing up in the consumeristic 1980's.  My family was very religious, and I grew up inside a conservative Christian belief system.  Much of my adult life was a process of extricating myself from those closed-minded cultural associations, to create a more inclusive spiritual life built on universal human values.  I am familiar with the challenges of religious disassociation and self-discovery, an experience I want to share because the worst part about it is the feeling of isolation, that there is something wrong with you. I am a voracious reader of anything related to better understanding the human experience, my favorite authors being Hannah Arendt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, F. Dostoyevsky, Thomas Merton, E.F. Schumaker, Leo Tolstoy, Carl Jung, Ian McGilchrist, and T.S. Eliot.

I used to be a competitive distance runner; the highlight of my career came running in the 2007 Boston Marathon. The wear and tear eventually caught up to me, and now I find my meditative space while riding a bicycle.  Some of my best thinking happens watching the countryside go by as I peddle.  I feel called to help bring a spiritual dimension back to human life.  We not only need to discard our shallow consumeristic values, but more importantly to transcend the harms and hinderance of traditional religion.  Christianity in America has become synonymous with bigotry and exclusion, and the collective stupidity that Bonhoeffer and Arendt saw take over Germany in the 1930's proliferates in America today.  Christian congregations are polluted with radical political agendas, and churches have become breeding grounds for dangerous Christian nationalism.  Colonialism has always been supported by the blessing of Christianity.  This continues in the US today, with our foreign policy written in the arrogant language of Western exceptionalism.  We have to move beyond materialism AND religion if we are to survive as a species, and reclaim our essential spirituality as interdependent creatures of community.  I want to help show how.