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.

What I attempted to do was similar except that I packed into the core of the mystery novel key elements of the Christian worldview that make Christianity attractive and grounded in knowledge.

A funny side point is that the knowledgeable folks at Harvest House decided to position Five Sacred Crossings as a book of apologetics and not as a novel because the Christian fiction genre is so over saturated right now. They wanted my new book not to be lost in that category. Hence, they helped come up with a subtitle "A Novel Approach to Reasonable Faith." So I don't know where you will find Five Sacred Crossings in the bookstore - in the apologetics/religion section, or in the fiction section.

Without giving too much away, can you say what the book is about?

The book is about a few weeks in the life of a college professor and brilliant natural linguist named Michael Jernigan who takes a college class through some teachings called "the five crossings" that he learned about in the Cambodian mountains as a young soldier in the Vietnam War. Through these teachings, and raucous discussion among a group of very diverse students, the class learns how the wisest of people approach life's biggest questions. The book is punctuated by an intense story about an Indonesian terror cell in the college town. I certainly won't tell you how it ends, but I've been stunned by the fact that about a dozen grown men (not to mention the scores of women) have contacted me to tell me they couldn't put it down and were in tears when they finished it.

Why did you write Five Sacred Crossings?

It seems to me that Christian philosophers, apologetics, and theologians in our generation have done some extraordinary work in re-establishing the intellectual credibility and the integrity of the Christian worldview in a secular and pluralistic age. What we haven't done, though, is find new ways to communicate these great truths to the masses who are so confused on issues of religious truth and the meaning of life. I thought I would try my hand at writing something that would appeal to people I know who would never read an apologetics textbook or a philosophy article in an attempt to engage them with clear thinking on the issues that matter most.