In my forty years as an Episcopal priest I never liked going to church. In fact, for the twenty-five years before that, I never liked going to church. It wasn’t until I went outside — literally, outside — that I came to realize there was a reason that I got into this business in the first place.

From Buddhist monks, to contemplative Christians, to through-going atheists, we hear that rather than seeking “God” as an idea, we need “to go where the energy is.” As I was entering the priesthood, the energy was leaving the institutional church. So I became a university chaplain, to find the energy was all around us — in science, in the arts, in meditation, in working in the streets with the homeless — there was a miraculous, divine energy which superseded material life, suggesting a better way to utilize this fleeting life we have been given.

When my bishop decided that he’d had enough of my being “outside” on a campus, he tried to reign me in, giving me to think: “Wait a minute! Jesus was outside!” And I realized the reason that Jesus was outside was that “outside” was where the energy was. So ten years ago, I cofounded my first outdoor community, in the dead of winter.

And in the process, I decided to write a book (www.christophercarlisle.com). Not a paint-by-number book that neutered the unpredictable energy of “God,” but a novel that recounted spiritual adventures like those of a renegade named Jesus. As science writer (and thorough-going atheist) Dick Teresi testifies, the novel suggests that “the church has been looking for God in all the wrong places.”