What are the roots of Into The Dax? How did I come to write the novel?

In 2016, suddenly, lifelong friends began filling their social media feeds with the language of a rising movement that used religion as a cudgel and cast people like me as enemies. I couldn’t make sense of it. We had all grown up together and shared the same values—or so I thought. Values that were also being crushed by an American culture that has morphed into Wolf of Wall Street thinking: that greed and self-interest are good.

This made me reflect on my Catholic upbringing and Western thought in general, and how we’ve lost a sense of community and reciprocity, not just with each other but with all living things on the earth.

So I began to write as a way to make sense of what we’re living through. I also read. I read books by philosophers, naturalists, indigenous leaders, comparative mythologists, religious thinkers, and scientists. Into The Dax is the result. It does what I hope good art does and holds a mirror in front of readers so they, too, can reflect on who they are, how they came to hold the beliefs they do, and what they want the future to be.

Want to explore topics from Into The Dax more deeply? I offer the following as recommended reading.