On Friday afternoon, I spent a wonderful couple of hours on Magazine Street, drinking coffee with my new friend Alan Cross. Alan is a Southern Baptist pastor leading a congregation in Montgomery, Alabama. He’s been on a sabbatical, and traveling. Our paths crossed in New Orleans, his hometown. The time passed like nothing; I could have sat there talking all night.

The next day, Alan sent me the review from his blog of my upcoming book How Dante Can Save Your Life. It’s a very generous assessment of the book. Here’s an excerpt:

Things did not go as he hoped, though, and family conflict arose driving him into a deep depression that dramatically affected his physical health. He was falling and could not find his way out of the hole. Then, one day, Rod stumbles upon Dante’s Commedia in a book store and a path toward freedom began to slowly unfold for him.

“Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, For the straight way was lost.” ~ Dante’s Inferno, I:1-3

That is how Inferno opens up and upon reading those lines, I was hooked. They described well how I felt myself. Forty years old and having been in full time ministry for 15 years, I had begun having trouble seeing my own way forward. What did God want me to do next? Where was my road going? I had lots of questions and few answers. So, I asked for a sabbatical from my church and was graciously granted one. For the past many weeks I had been reading, praying, traveling, and seeking God for a renewal and refreshing of His call and for a restored intimacy with Him that would give me the renewed ability to see the world through His eyes. Then, I get this Dante book in my email from Rod and have the chance to meet him. As I begin reading it, I am suddenly in the bookstore with Rod – in the dark wood with Rod and Dante – and recognizing that my own straight way was lost. How would I get out? I wanted to read the whole thing.

That is extremely gratifying to read, because it tells me that my book connected exactly as I hoped it would: with a fellow pilgrim on life’s road who is confused about where to go from here. One reason I love this review is that Alan is very clear that he, as a Baptist, disagrees with some of the theology discussed in my work, and in the Commedia. I have been worried that Evangelical readers will stay away from it because Dante is Catholic, and the whole thing seems so alien from the outside. Here’s Alan:

Rod takes the reader into Dante’s world and travels with him through Hell and Purgatory and then up to Paradise. Rod is Eastern Orthodox, who used to be a Catholic who used to be a Methodist and was an agnostic in between. And, he writes about a Late Medieval Italian Catholic poet. So, as a Protestant/Evangelical/Baptist, there is much that I do not agree with in both Rod’s theology and in Dante’s. I told Rod that and told him I would write that in my review and he said he completely understood and expected it. But, I also told Rod that as he wrote about Dante, there were sections where I thought, “that’s Evangelical theology right there,” and I realized that when the Orthodox journalist writes about the Medieval Catholic poet and the Baptist pastor recognizes his own theology showing up in places, then we are stumbling into what the Anglican scholar/philosopher C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity. And, even though I disagree with Rod and Dante and Lewis on certain things, it is encouraging to see the things that do bind us together, namely the person of Jesus Christ and His love for us. In other words, as Rod said at the end of our conversation after we had prayer together on the corner outside of the coffee house on Magazine St., “we are all on the same team.” Yes, and since we all see through a glass darkly, as Paul said, it is good when the light of Christ shines through clear enough for us to all see Him together.

So what does Dante, and my book about Dante, have to teach Baptists in particular? Alan says:

When Rod writes about the insights that he gained from Dante and how he met with his Orthodox priest and received soul care and guidance and how his Southern Baptist therapist helped him even further, I realized that much of what we call discipleship as Baptists is often simply the passing on of information in an institutional setting. Our goal is often trying to get people to the place where they can do evangelism or ministry instead of seeing them be made whole, as though we don’t realize that personal wholeness has its own value. And, maybe that is why it often works so poorly for us. The human heart is a complex thing and we are broken and suffer in deep ways because of both our own sins and the sins of others against us that wound us deeply. Scripture speaks to that, but it seems that we often want quick fixes and steps to be taken so we can get on with producing results and fail to realize that we are all on a journey and that Jesus is the Good Shepherd who leads us to still waters and green pastures if we would let Him. Dante talks about sin and the flesh and its consequences and he shows the way out of it through grace and forgiveness and pilgrimage and through following the better way of Jesus.

I also appreciated how Alan says How Dante Can Save Your Life is unavoidably a book about a Christian’s journey through a Christian poem, but like Dante’s epic, it has a lot of appeal to seekers who may not share our Christian faith, but who do share our common condition as pilgrims looking for safe harbor. That too is something I aimed for in writing the book. It’s a personal journey, this book, and that meant for me, a Christian journey. But I wrote How Dante with non-believers in mind too. The deep psychological insights Dante has into human nature, how we create problems for ourselves, and how we can get out of them, are universally true.

Read the entire review. I learned a lot from it. Alan kindly left me with a copy of his own 2014 book, When Heaven And Earth Collide, which is about race, Evangelical Christianity, and the history and culture of the South. I can’t wait to read it, and to compare Alan’s insights with those of the great Southern Baptist literary scholar Ralph Wood, whose book on Flannery O’Connor, which I have at my bedside, considers the same theme.

And pre-order How Dante. It’s out on April 14 — less than a month, if you can believe it (I can’t).