One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?

Adam and Eve - and especially Eve - are victims of the greatest character assassination the world has ever known. Eve is not secondary. Eve, if anything, is the great initiator in the story. She's the first independent woman. For me, rediscovering that Eve was the greatest bad**s women of all time was a revelation.

Moses became Americas true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.

We're in a hyper-connected world, and there's a crisis of connection. The first thing that God says about woman and man in the Bible is that it's not right for humans to be alone. Social media interaction cannot take the place of face-to-face interaction. If anything, it prevents us from doing that. We're staring into our screens for so long that we're forgetting to look at the people directly in front of us.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.

The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.