Like the street priest in his inaugural novel, For Theirs is the Kingdom, Carlisle descends from a Royal Navy admiral and the Anglican bishop of Montreal. The story revolves around a dramatic project under his grandfather’s cathedral. A plan to construct an underground shopping mall, metro stop and office tower, provides the historical artifact for the fictionalized account. Melding fiction and fact, Carlisle pursues the hypocritical greed of the church, and through the lens of his privilege, paradoxically discovers that the truth always lies on the margins. Carlisle’s second novel, Pickett’s Dream, was first written thirty years ago, and thanks to the vicissitudes of publishing, was accepted and never published. The story recalls the “Go-Go 1980s,” and the heyday of Yuppie culture, as the forgotten seed that was destined to produce the mayhem we now find ourselves in. Impossible romance, ill-fated dreams, memory, and hope, conspire to tell the story of our time, if not to foretell our future. A self-confessed contradiction, Carlisle portrays the conundrum of his generation—how to navigate the lures of the world toward a lasting transcendent vision. As an unabashed lover of beautiful things (and most of all, beautiful cars), he’s spent the last ten years working with the homeless amid the poverty of the street. So, his protagonist, John Pickett, replies to the narrator’s offer to avert his bankruptcy: “Thank you, Brooke. But it isn’t the money. It was never the money.” Carlisle also authored The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design, which grew out of his God and Science Project noted in The New York Times. Asked to write a “fair-handed” treatment of the religious controversy, he was caught in the crossfire between conservative Christians and liberal evolutionists. In the end, he concluded that both sides had missed the point, deferring to the wisdom of Einstein: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Carlisle earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and graduate theological degrees from Harvard and Yale, and is a regular commentator on New England Public Radio. He lives in western Massachusetts, spending as much time as he can in Montreal and the South of France. He is married with four children.