What is the name of the book and when was it published?
My book is called The Evangelical Experience. It was published in October 2015.
What’s the book’s first line?
I open with an Aldous Huxley quote: “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
– Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
My book is both an overview of the Evangelical movement in America and a brief memoir of my own journey through the faith, including reasons why I ultimately had to leave.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
The book was just inside me. I had a high degree of theological training and a lot of experiences that I needed to “do something with.” This was a good outlet for me to process my own journey.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
If you are interested in understanding how being an Evangelical distinctly colors one’s view of the world.