I was recently interviewed about my book, Five Sacred Crossings: A Novel Approach to a Reasonable Faith, by the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Here is Part 3 of 3 parts.

If you click on Five Sacred Crossings, you’ll go to a page where you can download a free chapter of the book. There is a video interview I did with Peter for Conversantlife.com

Can you tell us what it was like to write Five Sacred Crossings?

The thing I enjoyed the most was discovering myself where the story was going next. I did not have a detailed master plan before writing, so every day was a little surprise with regard to the unfolding of the narrative. I am still surprised by my own ending. Re-reading it was an experience that I certainly have never had when writing academic books and essays. I picked it up, started to read somewhere in the middle and couldn't put it down. I wrote the darn thing yet got caught up in the story myself! It was far more exciting and emotional than I remember when first writing it out.

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Pity the atheist.

There are not very many of them and a great many people in the US already don’t like them.

That is too bad, since many atheists are decent people who share basic American commitments to justice and the civil order even if they don’t share the basic American belief that these rights are an endowment by the Creator.

This isn’t just an intellectual mistake, but it means that every time they read most great American documents or visit great American sites, they face ideological offense. It doesn’t end with the theism of the Declaration or the way our Constitution was signed (without an ACLU produced qualm) “in the year of our Lord.” They must stand in the Lincoln memorial and read his great Bible soaked Second Inaugural Address. American Revolutionaries kept saying things like: “No King, but King Jesus!”

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There’s no getting around it. We live in a culture that includes beliefs and practices from every major world religion, and a whole bunch of minor ones. And we need to know what our neighbors, co-workers, and sometimes even our family members believe. That’s why I wrote Faith to Faith: A Conversation About Christianity and World Religions. This isn’t your typical “us vs. them” book about Christianity and other beliefs. I wrote Faith to Faith to give my fellow Christians as accurate a picture as possible of the beliefs and practices of the various world religions, not because I want to prove them wrong, but because we need to know how to relate to them.

The folks at Conversantlife.com thought it would be helpful to know a little more about my new book. So over the next few weeks I will be responding to some questions about Faith to Faith and why I wrote it. Even though I’m the one answering the questions, this isn’t intended to be a one-way conversation. I’d love to hear your responses to my thoughts. Even more, if you have a question you’d like to ask, please post it in the comments section at the end of this post.

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I was recently interviewed about my book, Five Sacred Crossings: A Novel Approach to a Reasonable Faith, by the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Here is Part 2 of 3 parts.

If you click on Five Sacred Crossings, you’ll go to a page where you can download a free chapter of the book. There is a video interview I did with Peter for Conversantlife.com

Who is your intended readership? And can you tell us about some of the reaction to the book?

I had certain folks in mind when I was putting the story together. Think about the millions of people who watch Oprah every day. They are open to spiritual and religious ideas, but want to connect with them first on an emotional level. They are open to thinking about the big issues if they are presented in a relevant and engaging way.

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I was recently interviewed about my book, Five Sacred Crossings: A Novel Approach to a Reasonable Faith, by the Evangelical Philosophical Society. I’m going to divide the questions and answers into three parts. Here is Part 1.

By the way, if you click on Five Sacred Crossings, you’ll go to a page where you can download a free chapter of the book. There is a video interview I did with Peter for Conversantlife.com


How would you characterize Five Sacred Crossings?

That's pretty straight forward. Five Sacred Crossings is a novel, pure and simple. The best way to capture the genre is to compare it to Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code. The Da Vinci Code is a fast-paced, page-turning mystery novel that packed into its center some teaching about the origins of Christianity. Unfortunately, Dan Brown bought an ugly package of historical gossip and unfounded nonsense as the "suppressed truth" he was hoping to reveal to the world. But what better way to communicate such things than for a couple of years to have every other person on a given airliner reading about it! Dan Brown had the wrong message, but the right vehicle to disseminate it.

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The second half of the interview I did for Canadian public television in Vancouver last year took an unexpected turn. It veered away from the psychological impact of aid work and touched on pedophiles and proselytizing. Didn't think the two topics naturally went together? Neither did I - until questioned on live national television :). Anyway, here's the six minute clip...

 

 

It seems that it is not as easy as it once was to speak about all religions as if they are the exact same thing just dressed in different clothing for different people groups at different times in history. With the continuing high profile of Islamic terror activities, stark contrasts are being presented between Islam and the other world religions. Islam is not the same as Buddhism, and Buddhism is not the same as Christianity, and so on. It is very unlikely that all of them are leading to heaven, God, or nirvana. This is much easier to grasp than it used to be.
I remember learning a very old and famous fable in grade school as the teacher tried to demonstrate that all the religions are really, underneath the surface, one and the same. You’ve probably heard it at one point or another and it goes like this.

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I'm sitting in the airport, getting ready to board the flight to Great Falls so that I can teach I Corinthians this week in a Bible School there. Meanwhile, the Dali Lama will continue his teaching/preaching tour of Seattle, finding record turnouts everywhere he goes.

What I find intriguing is the response I've receive, via e-mail, from various members of the Christian community. To my right is an e-mail vilifying the Dali, warning me sand mandalas are thinly veiled disguises for labyrinths, which are thinly veiled disguises for eastern monism, which is a thinly veiled disguise for Satan himself. Ergo: sand art = Satan. To my left are friends praising the Dali Lama's teaching as "precisely the right word for our time." If you want to know what he said in Seattle yesterday, you can find that here.

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During their Christmas break from school I took my teenage kids to see “The Golden Compass”—a movie based on the popular children’s books by Philip Pullman. In his famous trilogy, Pullman attempts to communicate a decidedly atheistic worldview through a compelling fantasy narrative. The film was fast paced, well acted, and visually splendid so it kept my attention for the entire two hours.

Of course, even though the anti-religious aspects were diluted in the movie, I was busy drinking in all the symbols and the obvious atheistic world view that was being set forth. Over burgers and fries after the movie I asked my kids what they thought the underlying message of the movie was. All three agreed: religious people steal children and then harm them all in the name of what is good; religious people believe unscientific myths and then manipulate everyone and everything in order to protect their myths. I think they nailed it.

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The first time I saw her, she was standing by the vending machine outside the classroom. When I got closer, I noticed that she smelled of sandalwood and rose. She had a string of beads woven into her hair and around her neck hung a thin rope on which was a picture of a brown man sitting in a half-lotus position. Glancing at the picture, I saw that there was a splash of color on the man’s forehead. His hand was raised in blessing and I wondering who he was praying for and why.

   When I realized that I was staring at the picture, I forced myself to look into her eyes. I needed to find out why she had asked to speak to me after class.

“What did you think of the lecture?” She asked.

“Well,” I replied with some caution, “the professor was certainly interesting. He convinced me that I need to know more about Bowley and attachment theory.”

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