Blog 12, July 2019 Questions of Faith and the History of Human Struggle

As a historical novelist, I find myself constantly evolving my views on the past, particularly the past of this country.  In addition to this, I find myself more and more lately infusing my faith in God with my understanding of history and particularly war and what makes us human.   Most of my adult life, I believed that besides the obvious exceptions like Hitler and Stalin, there really were no evil people in the world.   9-11 changed all that.   The evil I saw on that day was palpable and widespread, but so was human nobility.  I shielded myself up until then.  And the existence of human evil demands a response, when the evil spreads, as it so often does.

But I didn’t think war was inevitable even then.  It wasn’t until I read the poetry of, and went to readings of, Brian Turner’s poetry about Iraq that I realized that members of my own generation not only thought of war as a permanent state of the human condition, but I realized how fortunate I had been, post-Vietnam, to have grown up in a time of relative peace and stability in the US.   War, I realized, as I began working on IN LOVE AND WAR, is always with us in some form, and what Mack and Inga endured just brought home to me the innocence of so many of the youth inevitably involved in warfare.

Now I have written a novella, also about love and war, that I am in the process of expanding into a full length novel.   I am exploring my own faith in this work, trying to make sense of war and death.   War, in its basics, never changes; the names and dates may change, the machinery and weaponry may advance, the politics behind it may take on different hues, but war itself never changes.   It’s the failure of man to see others as his brothers and sisters.