Who is Ellen Makkai?
Columns by former syndicated columnist, Ellen Makkai, have been published on several major metropolitan editorial pages, and by Focus on the Family, WorldNetDaily, NewsWithViews and for Creator's Syndicate, among others. Her writing provided a response to the vast majority of secular writers who frequently discount or insult the faith community.
Ellen was a first-splash Baby Boomer, born in 1946, an illegitimate child born in Cambridge (MA) Community Hospital. “This child will never want for anything,” was a promise made to Ellen’s mother, and proved true, briefly. She was adopted into the aristocratic Brewster/Peabody family of Boston and raised to be socially adept, intellectually crisp and religiously sensible—all goals yet to be realized.
Childhood summers idled by in privileged Northeast Harbor, Maine and in the exclusive summer colony of West Chop on the once lazy Martha’s Vineyard Island. Ellen spent days there playing tennis, swimming, sailing and pilfering candy bars from the small post office/snack shop
Several exceptional girls’ schools tried, in vain, to properly educate and tame the fidgety blonde chatterbox, but the unknown malady ADHD sabotaged efforts. Determined to “fix” Ellen, her father, a Harvard-educated Freudian psychiatrist, arranged for six years of daily therapy, from age 7-13. These sessions served only to refine Ellen’s yarn-spinning skills.
Alcoholism and adultery propelled family moves from Boston to Cleveland to Denver and back to Boston, where Ellen Brewster spent an unheralded debutante season in 1964 as a wallflower behind the drapes or chatting with plants.
When much of her generation became the great-unwashed, this hippie wannabe was cloistered in a buttoned-up women's college. Still, she managed her share of misbehavior in the free-love 60s, culminating in the ill-advised trip to an abortionist.
Ellen’s eventual marriage to the son of Hungarian factory workers promptly bounced her from the Boston Social Register. She chose the obsolete lifestyle of suburban housewife and mother while her contemporaries explored the Peace Corps, corporate board rooms, open marriage and radical feminism. Later she attempted an adoption search with unexpected results. But it was the 70s Jesus Movement and the peculiar world of Bible readers that eventually rescued and defined her.
She guided non-denominational Bible studies and seminars for over 30 years, and speaks to groups about how a child raised among Ivy League intellectuals landed in good old foot-stomping revivals. Her audiences included believers, seekers, skeptics, as well as belligerent atheists.
"Biblical common sense is often ignored or no longer taught in our society," Ellen says. "There should always be a place in secular publications for that time-tested wisdom."
Though raised by New Englanders, Ellen has lived in the Denver, Colorado area for 50 years and has been a fixture of sorts in the Denver Christian community for over 35 years.
With a husband off flyfishing and her children well into their 30s, Ellen Makkai continues her commentary, now in an abbreviated form. Someone once noted, "She has an opinion about everything whether she knows anything about it or not!"