The First Sin

Lena Winfrey Seder grew up with a loving Christian family in the Virginia countryside. As a shy young woman, she sought to expand her horizons and fly, like a butterfly. At first, her focus was on worldly success and fame, but when she found herself unable to obtain satisfactory answers to her doubts about her religious traditions, she began a spiritual quest for the truth. She emerged from her cocoon with Islam at her side, to guide her in her life and travels. In this autobiographical account, the author uses a series of flashbacks to weave back and forth among important events and places in her life, before and after she embraced Islam. She explains what attracted her to Islam and describes the effects of her choice on key relationships in her life. Her narration is laced with personal anecdotes and heart-felt advice about being patient in the face of adversity. Her experiences are woven together to create more than just a simple narrative; this is a unique account of the Metamorphosis of a Muslim.

In The Cross and The Crescent, Dr. Dirks, a former ordained minister (deacon) in the United Methodist Church, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and with a doctorate in clinical psychology, reaches out to the Christians and the Muslims for an interfaith dialogue. Drawing on his seminary education and thirty years of interaction with Muslims in America and overseas, the author digs deep into the roots of Christianity to bring out obscure information that highlights what was once common between Christianity and Islam. He envisioned that, “In writing this book, I would like to touch the lives of those Christians who have not been given the knowledge that I have gained both about Islam, from my direct contact with Muslims, and about Christianity from my seminary education. I want to share with those Christians, who are willing to listen, what is so often known by their clergy and church leaders, but seldom finds its way into their knowledge of their own religion. Likewise, I would like to reach out to the Muslims, in order to help them understand the religious commonality that they share with Christians”.

The book is called Beyond Mere Christianity for two reasons. First, in response to C.S. Lewis’ influential 1952 work, Mere Christianity, which stands as a masterpiece of Christian apologetics. The second reason, perhaps less obvious, is that a case can be made, based on current, responsible Gospel scholarship, that Jesus was calling his people to the Salvation that lies beyond the worship of the merely created, the Salvation that relies instead on the direct worship of the Creator. I believe emphatically that the authentic words of Jesus invite us to move beyond what is conventionally understood as Christianity for this Salvation.

This book is a highly relevant piece of research for our turbulently chaotic world today. The heavy baggage of mutual distrust and detestation from the days of ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Spain through to the Crusades and Colonialism has left behind a fuzzy and muddled image of Islam and Muslims in the eyes of others; Muslims too, have been seeing the West as the primary cause of all their woes and vilification.