Why I Kept Looking

An introduction to this newsletter and the friendship that made it necessary

He told me Islam was the final word from God. We were eating lunch in a parking lot, cab of the truck still warm, and he said it the way a man says something he has never once doubted. I looked at everything he showed me. Then I kept looking — past the point where he wanted me to stop, into the parts of his tradition he had never examined himself. That looking cost us the friendship. This newsletter is where I put what I found.

My name is A.C. Rosenthal. I am a carpenter’s son, a committed Christian, and a writer who spent fifteen years arguing about God with a man I loved like a brother. He was the son of a Turkish imam. We worked construction together. We ate lunch together. We disagreed about almost everything that mattered and agreed about enough of the rest to make the friendship real.
He wanted me to become Muslim. I wanted him to follow the evidence wherever it went. Neither of us got what we wanted.
This newsletter is called A.C. Rosenthal. It covers history, philosophy, and culture. What that means in practice is this: I write about the questions most people know matter but few have the framework to engage. I write about what the historical record actually shows when you apply consistent standards to it. I write about what it costs, personally and civilisationally, when we decide certain questions are too dangerous to ask honestly.
I am not an academic. I have no letters before or after my name. What I have is fifteen years of reading in the primary sources, a decade of sustained argument with a man who knew his tradition well, and a carpenter’s habit of finding the load-bearing element before I put my weight on anything.
I write under a pen name for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who reads my work carefully.
My first book is The Two Muhammads. My second is The God They Rejected Isn’t Real. My third, The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son, is the book that started all of this — the one I am most proud of, and the one still looking for a publisher.
This is where I write in the meantime. This is where the questions live that I cannot stop asking.
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