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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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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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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A group of esteemed public intellectuals in America from Gore Vidal to Howard Zinn have risen boldly to challenge the official explanations of the alleged terror attacks on September 11, 2001. The latest prominent critic of the official account that Muslim terrorists brought down the World Trade Center towers with fuel-laden passenger airliners is Professor David Ray Griffin, a senior theologian from southern California’s Claremont School of Theology who is traveling around the country attempting to stir up the far left of the Democratic base during the election season about this very important issue.

In his recent book and his public lectures on college campuses, theologian Griffin sounds as if he went back for dual degrees in engineering and investigative reporting as he uncovers the “real” evidence in the case.

Seriously, American Idol from the beginning has been unwittingly dishing out some rather profound personal and philosophical insight.

For the last few weeks we’ve watched people wandering in from the community and auditioning raw before Randy, Paula, and Simon with hopes of being selected to move on to the next stage in Hollywood, the auditioning hopefuls fall into four basic groups. The first are those who actually have enough talent on display or discernible cachet to be chosen to move up. Second are those who are pretty good, but not good enough to move up (we don’t see many of those on the broadcast—not enough drama). Third are those who know they are bad singers and are there for their fifteen minutes of fame or the thrill. Most of the lessons about American culture, though, come from the fourth category which is composed of those who really do think they are good, but are, in reality, atrocious by any objective measure.

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Although God so loved mankind that he gave his only begotten Son, historically man has not followed God's example when it has come to the treatment of his fellow man. In fact, we have made great progress in the second half of the twentieth century in our maltreatment of Homo sapiens (while, interestingly enough, during the same period other species have found increased protection against maltreatment.) Just a few years ago one found it necessary to point to the regimes of Hitler and Stalin to illustrate archetypal examples of man's inhumanity to man. Now one simply needs to take the wrong off ramp on a southern California freeway to see it first hand. Gang tyranny and terrorism, although on a smaller but growing scale, have displayed a similar disregard for human life found in Stalin's "five-year plan" and Hitler's "final solution."

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