One of the underlying themes of my latest novel, Distant Thunder, as in my other stories, is the place of faith in a world where religious views are either abandoned or seized with fervor. It is a time when religions increasingly compete and sometimes cause suffering.

Distant Thunder can be read as a love story between two people no longer young who carry baggage from past choices. On another level, the characters, of varying shades of religious conviction, deal with other issues. They struggle to define faith, or even to accept faith, within a time that asks if faith does more harm than good.

Though Americans, they see domestic issues of their country through a global lens. The main protagonists are Christian, because I know more about Christians, being one myself. Yet they are interested in other religions, foreign affairs, and current events, areas not usually a subject of this type of fiction. Like characters from my previous novels, they are rooted in time and place because their struggles are the struggles of a particular  time and place: American Christians since the end of World War II to the post 9/11 era.

It is against this background that the characters change and mature in ways they would not in a purely domestic setting. Christianity is, after all, a world religion.