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Sometime, in the near future, Jack Pence finds himself in New York City . . . alone. A sole survivor, apparently, of an unstoppable pandemic. He begins a journey West, hoping to find someone -- anyone -- who has also survived. The search proves fruitless, and Jack stops in the tiny hamlet of Luna, New Mexico, slipping into despondency, and then despair, on the brink of defeat.

But when he suddenly finds he is not alone after all, what happens next re-ignites his consciousness, provides him a home, and launches him on an unforgettable mission.

Rough Water Baptism is about a dramatic shift in Elise Brinkley’s world. She has grown up in San Francisco, with her brilliant neuroscientist father, and has absorbed from him and from her environment a worldview that insists that the material world is all there is. Her faith in that way of thinking becomes tested. Her life is in some ways perfect, unperturbed by doubt, but she experiences through her friend Joy a sense that there may be something more to this life.

Then she is swept up in romance with the handsome and enigmatic Tino.

Tino is not all that he appears to be, however, and Elise’s world comes crashing down around her in the space of a few hours...

There is a big gap between the orthodox Christian understanding of reality, and that of the default materialism of the culture. We tend not to recognize the default perspective as coherent, doctrinal, and dogmatic, in the same way religion is understood to be. This is partly because of the tendency to describe one's views by what they are not, rather than what they are. To say "I'm not very religious," for example, is to say what one isn't, not what one is. The effect of this tendency is to obscure the metaphysical stance absorbed in place of religion, leaving an illusory neutrality concerning spiritual truth.
Reality is the widest conceptual net we can cast. The right first question is: what constitutes all of reality? Theism provides one answer, materialism another. We would do well to look critically at both. This book traces the fault line between theism and materialism so as to follow the evidence where it leads--evidence like the fact of being; our incessant yearning; our competing desires both for significance and insignificance; and the subjective motivations we have with respect to beauty, truth, and morality, all indicators of transcendent truth to which our physical surroundings point.

In this book, a history of truth formation is presented, distinguishing the medieval to modern periods, and then the modern to postmodern, highlighting the thinking of Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, and John Dewey, among many others.

Western civilization is at a precarious crossroad.  It relies on objectivity of truth and of right and wrong, a first principle until about the turn of the twentieth century.  But in more recent years postmodern ideas of truth-formation began to gain traction, and Christianity lost its grip on Western cultures in favor of secular ideologies.  The result has been the bloodiest century in human history, and the accelerated proliferation of oppressive ideologies.  Postmodern critiques during this time have become general in the culture, like a virus escaped from the lab.

We live this life in the body conscious of a vaguely felt lack of completeness.  We may describe it as “alienation,” leaving open-ended what about us is being alienated from what.  The Genesis worldview tells us the alienation is a natural condition of our existence, unfortunately.  It is the result of our moral agency and our two-nature, spiritual and material, essence:  we are dust-formed but also God-breathed.  If we reject the Genesis worldview, the sense of alienation does not go away, and so we grope around trying to explain it.  Hence postmodern theory.

This book is about the chasm between the Genesis worldview, and that of postmodernism.  The differences are not merely competing truth claims, but competing claims about how truth is formed in the first place.  And not only truth, but right and wrong, and even beauty.  Where do these ideals originate, and why do we struggle so much now in our pursuit of them?   There is an answer, and we can find our way to it by rejecting disastrous flirtations with postmodernist critique and negation, to recover individual human dignity, and freedom, and even a renewed sense of brotherhood, by appeal to universal values even in our differences.