My Passion: To Equip and Educate

How did a former atheist end up writing Christian curriculum at Sonlight? That's a long story that I can't answer completely in one blog post. Fortunately, every now and then I'll contribute a post here and can fill in details as we go. Let's start with who I am.

My name is Robert Velarde and I serve as a curriculum creator on Sonlight's product development team. I'm also father to four wonderful homeschooled children.

Although my bachelor's degree is in music, after I became a Christian I pursued ministry-oriented interests, being especially interested in anything relating to comparative religions and apologetics—the reasoned defense of Christianity. This resulted in many years of service with Christian ministries, graduate studies in philosophy, and a master's degree in religion. As I matured as a Christian, I had a desire grow to write books—something I've had the joy of doing repeatedly now.

At Sonlight I work with a gifted, creative team of dedicated people. I meet with Sonlight's president, Sarita Holzmann, regularly as we discuss ideas, refine products, edit content, and do the best we can to make homeschooling easy and edifying. One of the products I had the pleasure of working on recently is What Good is Christianity?

My passion is to equip and educate Christians so they know what they believe and why they believe it, and are able to understand and articulate their own perspective, as well as opposing viewpoints. In short, every believer needs to develop their view of the world. A robust Christian worldview is integrated into all of life and is capable of intelligently interacting with any ideas and challenges it encounters.

In future posts I'd like to explore in more detail some of the ideas brought up here. I'd also love to hear from you.