Cross Examined

In 1906, three men share a destiny forged by a prophecy of destruction. That prophecy comes true with staggering force with the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and young assistant pastor Paul Winston is cast into spiritual darkness when his fiancée is among the dead. Soon Paul finds himself torn between two powerful mentors: the charismatic pastor who rescued him from the street and an eccentric atheist who gradually undercuts Christianity’s intellectual foundation.

In 1906, three men share a destiny forged by a prophecy of destruction. That prophecy comes true with staggering force with the San Francisco earthquake and fire, and young assistant pastor Paul Winston is cast into spiritual darkness when his fiancée is among the dead. Soon Paul finds himself torn between two powerful mentors: the charismatic pastor who rescued him from the street and an eccentric atheist who gradually undercuts Christianity’s intellectual foundation. As he grapples with the shock to love and faith, Paul’s past haunts him. He struggles to retain his faith, the redemptive lifesaver that keeps him afloat in a sea of guilt. But the belief that once saved him now threatens to destroy the man he is becoming. Paul discovers that redemption comes in many forms. A miracle of life. A fall from grace. A friend resurrected. A secret discovered. And maybe, a new path taken. He realizes that religion is too important to let someone else decide it for him. The choice in the end is his—will it be one he can live with? Cross Examined challenges the popular intellectual arguments for Christianity and invites the reader to shore them up … or discard them. Take the journey and see where it leads you.

After graduating from MIT in 1980, Bob Seidensticker designed digital hardware, about which he wrote his first book, The Well-Tempered Digital Design (Addison-Wesley, 1986). He has programmed in a dozen computer languages and in environments ranging from punch cards, to one of the first windowing environments, to MS-DOS, to Windows (starting with version 1.0). He is a co-contributor to 14 software patents and has worked at a number of technology companies from a 10-person startup to Microsoft and IBM. Since leaving Microsoft, he has focused on writing. Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2006) explored technology change—how we see it and how it really works. Cross Examined is his first novel.