I added a section to my medical application today about my book. I'm supposed to describe experiences, their effect on me, and impact on community, as well as a contact person. I don't know that they'll contact you, but you're listed as the Acquisitions Editor with your BYU email. I'm looking forward to cranking on this. Below is the text I sent, about 4 characters below the maximum limit. I have a non-fiction book contract related to my graduate work. I identified a need, then did informal market research and public prewriting. On that basis I was awarded a contract and research honorarium. The topic indirectly affects public policy and science education. Its current form is a rough draft/outline with much of the research already done. The research uses primary and secondary sources in English, Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, German, and French. I intend to finish it before beginning medical school. The publisher (The Maxwell Institute) is a research press associated with my alma mater, Brigham Young University. To maximize impact, I am writing it as a non-specialist volume.I argue that the proper framing of Genesis 1 is Near Eastern mythic/polemic, not modern scientific/historic. That is, Genesis 1 consists of an Israelite adaptation of some common Near Eastern creation motifs, reworked into a tacit Priestly argument against competing creation accounts. Unaware of these accounts or their relationship to Genesis 1, readers today unconsciously recontextualize it in a post-Enlightenment framework wherein “truth” means scientific/historical fact. Thus if Genesis 1 is not consistent with science, it cannot be “true.” Although this reasoning is completely foreign to Genesis, it lies at the root of some serious education and policy issues today.Those who reject well-established science do so because of the perception that it contradicts Genesis 1, although the interpretation it contradicts is largely a modern misreading. Exposition of original context thus contributes to diffusing the tension between “science” and “religion.” Indeed, this approach proves the most effective; scientific argument tends to fail because it is not on the same philosophical playing field as the interpretive argument. By addressing the interpretive argument, with science only as subtext, I expect my book to have an indirect but strongly positive and meaningful effect on attitudes towards science. Cheers Ben Spackman --“History is far more intimately related to fiction than we have been accustomed to assume.”- Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative