My job is to allow the character to live and breathe - and become as real to the reader as he or she is to me.

I actually worked in the general market for many years writing steamy historical romance, and I had more freedom in the Christian market than I ever did in the general market to write about any issue that I needed to write about.

My favorite book is 'Redeeming Love.' It was my first as a born-again Christian, my statement of faith, and the most exciting year I've spent writing anything.

When we love like Jesus does, lives change for the better.

One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.

Adam was the image of God, he was man and woman, and yet neither of them before his Eve, but a masculine virgin in peculiar love, full of chastity and purity.

Martha Graham, along with George Balanchine, is one of the two commanding figures in 20th-century American dance. For those much younger than I am, her genius as a performer will have to be taken on faith - and on the always-suspect evidence of film. What will last, if things go well, is her genius as a choreographer, as a woman of the theater.

The biggest threats to faith aren't anything outside of it: they come bearing the name. It's why I find it especially important to call it out - also why I find it especially repulsive when people who crow the loudest about being Christians and use it as a money-making scheme utterly betray the faith when not on camera or in a crowd.