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Current line up (subject to revision)

(In no particular order)

• G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy | Amazon Link | Buy Direct
• Blaise Pascal’s Pensees | Amazon Link | Buy Direct
• George MacDonald’s Lilith | Amazon Link | Buy Direct
• Simon Greenleaf’s Testimony of the Evangelists
• Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
• Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians
• John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
• William Paley’s Natural Theology
• The Apologies of Justin the Martyr
• John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
• David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Q. In 2009 ACM launched a Christian Writing Contest, which was an outgrowth of ACM’s desire to develop a genre of fiction called “literary apologetics.” Forgive me, but immediately books like C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and The Chronicles of Narnia come to mind. Is that what you’re looking for? What kind of material did you receive?

Lewis’s works certainly represent the epitome of what we think about ‘literary apologetics.’  To expand on our intent, though, you’d have to also mention writers like G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Madeline L’Engle, and J.R.R Tolkien.  We could throw in some others, too, like Graham Greene and Charles Williams.  I guess you could say that what sets our vision apart is that we are thinking more intentionally.  I doubt very much, for example, that Tolkien meant his work as any kind of apologetic.  The key point is to communicate the Christian world view through the arts, and fiction in particular.  This can be overt, but it need not be.  Quality story-telling from a person who is a Christian may not be explicitly Christian in content but the ‘air’ the reader breathes will influence them towards a Christian perspective.  Such literature may not ultimately save, just as ‘clean air’ won’t extract a drowning man from the waves, but at least you aren’t overwhelmed by noxious fumes during the rescue.

Most of our stories received were more on the explicit side but I think our winners were subtle even when they were overt, and that is what I liked.  Most of the stories could be read- and enjoyed- even by non-Christians.  Our 19 and Up category second place winner has a book or two published already and ACM itself will be publishing a collection of short stories of one of the third place winners from that category.  I think there are some people that just ‘get’ how to further the kingdom of God through the arts and literature.  We need to find them and encourage them and that’s part of what the contest is about.

What I would like to see come out of our efforts for literary apologetics is more of deliberate approach by the whole Church to raise up writers who are Christian.  Intentionally.  We need more than pastors and Bible teachers and youth leaders.  We need Christians living out their faith in a robust manner in all vocations, and the writing vocation is one that has strategic value in our hyper-media society.

See also:  http://www.onlineapologeticsconference.com

Q. You’ve got a fiction series called Birth Pangs. What motivated you to write this series? What’s it about?

I guess you could say that the Birth Pangs series is my own excursion into ‘literary apologetics.’  It’s pretty unique.  A friend has described it as belonging to the didactic genre.  The series is set in the ‘not too distant future’ after America has been laid low by foreign armies and a biological and nuclear holocaust.  Now, they are rebuilding from scratch.  This setting allows me to discuss everything under the sun:  what is truth, what is real, how do you know?  What is the relationship between religion and government?  What does it mean to be human?  Or a man or a woman in particular?  So on and so forth, only in my series there is no government, church, or school to tell the characters what the real answers are.
The series actually came into my head, nearly fully formed, in the last few months of a stint as an over the road truck driver.  I was motivated to write it because I love writing stories but I think the germ of this particular story was my reflecting on all that we take for granted.  For example, as a truck driver I was criss crossing the country on nicely paved and administered roads.  I imagined what life would be like without that kind of infrastructure.  What if I had to walk to California from Arkansas?  What if I couldn’t just go to the grocery store to get food?  Then I started thinking about what life would be like without that other kind of infrastructure we take for granted- our educational systems, our political system, our churches, etc, in short, our intellectual infrastructure.  You could say that the setting of the series was engineered to provide an opportunity to imagine what that would be like.

There is some definite Christian perspective in the series but the whole point of the series is to give other perspectives a hearing, too.  I have a good friend who is an atheist and liberal who has enjoyed both books in the series and some of my more conservative friends enjoy it, too.  I like that I can appeal to both groups, but the series is not for everyone, either.  There can be some meaty philosophy and theology in the midst of the fantastic battles and subtle diplomacy. 

Q. Final question: What do you want the end of your life to look like? What do you want people to say at your funeral?

It is my hope that my life looks exactly the way the Author intended it to look, and I recognize that the Author has higher patterns and themes that he has in mind.  I like the image of the handmade tapestry that looks on the backside like an arrangement of randomly covered knots, strands, and frayed edges, but when you flip it over you see the grand picture.  I have a feeling I’m one of those frayed edges and I won’t presume to know what it looks like on the other side… or even to offer a hope as to what it will look like as the Artist’s vision will certainly be beyond what I could even conceive.

For my funeral, I hope a lot of money isn’t spent and that the savings will be invested in folks sitting around drinking coffee or beer and chips:  the stuff of parties.  But if any conclusions were to be drawn, I hope that it will be agreed that I was a loyal friend and a good husband and father.  And by ‘good’ I mean in the Aslan sense:  “Of course he isn’t safe… but he is good.”  People will survive the death of the universe.  Only people last:  so the meaning of life is found only in relationships.  When I look back on my life I see a series of failures on my part to build and sustain meaningful relationships.  I hope in the end that there will be successes, too.

No doubt this tragedy is going to be hashed out along ideological grounds for some time to come.   For my part, I’m not very interested in those kinds of conversations, though I do note again how for the atheist, any transgression by an individual seems to be grounds for snide arguments against religion as a whole and Christianity in particular.  One of the commenters on my forum thinks that such approaches only occur among the ‘simple-minded’ atheists (his characterization) but as the thread I just linked to well illustrates, there is actually a large segment of the atheistic community that doesn’t expend much effort to make distinctions once they get rolling.

No, what I’m interested in is two-fold.  In the first place, the Christian religion says that people are by nature sinful and fallen.  So it isn’t any surprise to Christians- or it shouldn’t be- when humans do bad things to other humans.  We shouldn’t even be surprised when Christians are mean to other Christians.   For this reason, though I don’t for a minute believe that atheism was irrelevant to Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot’s atrocities, the really critical ingredient is that it was forgotten or denied that people will tend to do bad things and so no checks and balances were erected that could have countered some of the abuses that followed.  Similarly, though there was certainly religious fervor behind events like the Crusades and the Inquisition, the core factor was not ‘religion’ but rather a dangerous centralization of unchecked power.

Now, I have found atheists that will generally agree with this position, though it is usually quickly forgotten when a catalog for true abuses in the name of religion is demanded (and quickly remembered when disavowing the atheistic views of the aforementioned tyrants).   However, this isn’t really far enough.  Yes, we agree that unchecked power is a recipe for disaster, but why should it be?  Isn’t it possible that any sufficiently enlightened group of humans would exert their power in humane and benevolent ways?

The answer to that has got to be a resounding ‘no.’  There is nothing in human history to suggest otherwise and to hope for it is only to invite future destruction.

But what explains that fact?  I have never heard of a genocide by the gorillas.   Have we found concentration camps erected by dogs?  Do the birds establish kingdoms?  Where is the Maginot Line erected by honey bees and the  equivalent to the great wall of China to keep out the lemur hordes?  No, raw brutality towards one’s own entire species seems to be a problem unique to the human race, with or without religion.

But can we generate an explanation for that fact without religion?

When liberal pacifist Reinhold Neibuhr was confronted with the realities that emerged after WW2, he had a change of heart and mind and realized that Original Sin was real.  GK Chesterton wrote that Original Sin was the only Christian doctrine that can actually be empirically demonstrated.  He said that before the calamities of the 20th century occurred.  So sad that the Bolsheviks and Nazis didn’t read their Chesterton!  (If they had, and listened, I suppose Neibuhr would have remained liberal.)

The response of these two Christians in the face of human nature’s apparent depravity was to identify it with a doctrine that was already known to them within the Christian community.  What is the atheist going to turn to?