The premise of this book is that the Beatitudes are like a stairway, each one leading to the next as a logical consequence of the one that came before, and that the rest of Matthew chapter 5 is a commentary, a fleshing out of the consequences of what the Beatitudes are designed to accomplish in our lives. The first Beatitude is salvation, and each of the others depict the gradual process of sanctification in our lives. In the rest of Matthew 5 Jesus shows us the true nature of our brokenness, and also the fantastic new identity we acquire once we enter the kingdom of heaven. This is not a scholarly work. It is about such wonderful news that God wanted to come here to tell it to us personally, as a loving human teacher. It can be read in a day or a weekend, or twenty minutes a day, as a devotional. It can be read more than once, with growing pleasure. It is not an analysis of what the great thinkers of the past have said. It references no commentaries. It is one man's insight gained by reading the Word, and looking up the meanings of the individual words, and contemplating what it adds up to. It is something that anyone can do, if they listen as they read, and ask the text questions. While it is nice to achieve letters behind our name, and become experts on scripture, most of us never will do that. But we all can hear from God when He speaks to us through His Word. There is a joy of discovery we can experience when we delve into the Bible. The Beatitudes can be thought of as Jesus' introduction to how we start out on that path.

Adrian is an unbelievably rich twenty-six year old introverted recluse with a secret. Aside from the fact he is still a virgin, no one has an inkling the Patents which made him rich come from dreams he has of cat-people, dog-people, and bear-people on an alien world called Eros. His dreams might be a secret on Earth, but everyone on Eros has heard of the furless man depicted in the ancient Book of Pictures. The furless man is supposed to end the five hundred year old war between Eros and the reptile-people of the Gorlon Empire. It would all be so easy if they only knew where to find this furless man. The head sorcerer on Eros searches him out in the celestial flow that binds all sentient beings. He concentrates so hard to initiate the blue sparkling energy of the flow, he fails to see the King's daughter watching from the shadows of his library. Her cat heritage curiosity overcomes caution and she accidentally steps through the flow to Earth. It is love at first touch and the two twenty-six year old virgins are inconsolable when the sorcerer grabs her back to Eros. 500 lights years is not very far for a Princess in love. She makes it back to Earth with a few of her friends and sets in motions events that change how human beings see the cosmos. Adrian's quiet life get complicated when the King wants his daughter back and a Gorlon assassin arrives to capture her no matter how many humans are killed. The Earth military complex wants her for the technology she has and a lot of good old boys just want to be the first to bag an alien. Sometimes a nerd in love cannot catch a break.

His premise is that civilizations have "life spans," and the Western civilization that produced America and Europe has been replaced, in our lifetime, and before our very eyes. To people whose minds were made by the West, the civilization we now find ourselves in often feels wrong, evil even, but we also find ourselves feeling oddly affectionate toward this strange new world. And the more time that passes, the more "normal" the New Civ gets to feel. We sometimes have to "pinch" ourselves to remember that society once had roots in a universe that knew something of moral absolutes, where the horrible behaviors we now read about in every morning newspaper were so rare that one such event in a year would have felt like the world is just about to end. But these things are what passes for "normalcy" today. We are still able to be reminded of what we know in our bones, although it gets harder all the time: something has gone terribly wrong. That's what this book is about.