I so enjoyed my conversation with author, lawyer, legislator, minister, Rodger McDaniel about his latest book - Profiles in Courage: Standing Against the Wyoming Wind.
McDaniel was a Wyoming state legislator from 1971-1981 and the Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate in 1982. He received a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1980. After practicing law for 20 years, he received a Master of Divinity degree from the Iliff School of Theology in Denver and was ordained in 1999.
He was a 2000 Fellow at the College of Preachers, National Cathedral, Washington, DC, now Cathedral College of Faith and Culture. While there he studied what it means for Christians to worship God on land stolen from Indigenous Peoples.
He was Director of the Wyoming Department of Family Services and headed the state’s mental health and substance abuse programs from 2003-2011. He is currently the pastor at Highlands Presbyterian Church in Cheyenne.
Rodger has written five books. His most recent - Profiles in Courage: Standing Against the Wyoming Wind - is a collection of stories of 13 individuals and groups who are either marginalized people or their advocates who stood against the prevailing culture.
Rodger’s first book - Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins-The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt - was named the best nonfiction book of 2013 by the Wyoming State Historical Society. The Sagebrush Gospel was published in 2014. A fourth book is entitled “Howard Zinn and Lois Mottonen Fistfight in the Equality State.”
“The Man in the Arena-The Life and Times of US Senator Gale McGee,” was published in September 2018 by Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press and was named the Wyoming State Historical Society best nonfiction book of 2013. In his review of the book, Don Ritchie, the Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate, wrote “Rodger McDaniel is a fine writer and a thorough researcher. His account of the U.S. Senate in the 1960s and 1970s is solid and convincing. He has produced a study that should appeal to anyone interested in Congress's role in American foreign policy, the Vietnam War, and twentieth-century American politics."
