“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Hebrews 11: 1

It’s after midnight.  You’re knelt beside the bed of your beloved twin sister while she sleeps.  The doctors have pronounced her condition incurable and determined she has little more than a fortnight to live.

Here before you is your best friend, your most trusted confidant and above you looms the tormenting burden of profound loss that the doctors and ministers have concluded is unavoidable.

The beloved culture of your land, steeped in a proud tradition of moral clarity, and religious zeal requires that you begin the time-honored pre-mourning rituals. Yet there on your knees as you pray for ease of passing and an eternity of bliss something on the inside nags at your heart and mind insisting that more can be done.

Desperate for hope you let that nagging feeling in; you even nurture it — only to discover that you must betray your creed to follow it.

What do you do?

This is Calvin Gooding’s dilemma in THE DARK PROVINCE: SON OF DUPRIN. For him, the answer is to deny his religion in order to follow his faith.

Are there times in our universe where faith and religion can come into conflict with one another?

Having been raised in one of the stricter  Christian traditions while maintaining my faith to this day, I found this to be a fascinating subject to write about.  Indeed, I believe that faith and religion can part ways. If the religion or major elements of it cease to be hopeful, then faith will inevitably guide the faithful to leave religion behind.

Not that one is broadly good while the other is bad. Like many mechanisms in human spirituality they serve in different ways.

Religion, being a large and complex device that organizes a system of ideas, is designed to be accessible to a multitude of people.  It provides rules to live by, answers to very difficult questions, and stories of people who shared the same beliefs and whose experiences and accounts contribute to the system’s legitimacy.

Faith, on the other hand, is a more fluid substance experienced one individual at a time. It provides a confidence that perseveres through adversity. It emerges from the deepest places of the human soul. It guides without rules or tangible system of fact-checking or registered instruction manual.

Calvin’s epic journey in this fantasy adventure tests his faith across countless obstacles that change both his religion and his faith forever.