Where did "The Sacred Chain" come from?

An occasional newsletter about my new book

In the summer of 2022 I had this big, beautiful idea for a book, and it had what I believed to be a brilliant title. But in the process of working with my literary agent, I was persuaded that my idea was more properly characterized as “sprawling”. So I went off on sabbatical that fall with the assignment of paring it down to the size that is more easily digestible by the general public. By February of 2023 I had done that to the satisfaction of the literary agency, but with the sad consequence that my brilliant title was no longer appropriate.

[aside]: I now think the brilliant title will work for the sequel to this book, and so I’m hesitant to say it out loud here for fear that someone else will steal it — present company of readership excluded, of course, but who knows what bad actors might be lurking in the ether?! There is also a lot of water that needs to flow fortuitously under the bridge in order for the sequel to become a reality, so let’s not jinx it.

So I was on the phone with my agent Gail and one of her colleagues, Dara. Gail said, “OK Jim, we think this proposal is ready to send out to publishers now, but we need to come up with a title. It might not stick, but we want something that will catch their eye. Do you have any ideas?”

“I don’t know… maybe something with ‘philosophy’ in it, or ‘transcendence’ or ‘epiphenomenon’?” I said.

[aside]: I didn’t really suggest those words (except maybe ‘philosophy’); I’m simply trying to give you the feeling that I didn’t really have any good ideas, and that I’m out of my depth in attempting to do marketing for the masses.

Gail responded with, “Yeah, I don’t think those are working very well yet. Dara, do you have any ideas?” At this point, Dara rattled off about six fairly plausible sounding titles, and Gail exclaimed, “Wow! Did you just come up with those?”

Dara said, “No, I just asked ChatGPT.”

Remember, this was February of 2023, and ChatGPT was still a new and curious thing. From the list of possible titles, the one that made all three of us say, “Hmm… that might have some possibilities” was The Sacred Chain. It was punchy and pithy and had some interesting connotations. We agreed to sleep on it, and decide the next day.

In the meantime, I started googling. I discovered that there was another book by that name published in 1994 that was a history of Jewish people. But titles aren’t copyrighted, and I didn’t think that would cause much confusion or conflict of interest with my book. But it got me thinking more about the connotations of “sacred chain”. We had originally thought of “chain” as primarily referring to the DNA molecule that is sometimes called a chain, and modifying it with “sacred” brings in the religious side of things and makes you wonder whether God might have had something to do with our DNA coming to be the way it is.

[aside]: I don’t typically like confusing the scientific and religious discourses like this, and I’ve written a couple articles about how we shouldn’t do that. In most instances I think we should let science do science and let theology do theology. But maybe the economical space of a title is one place where it’s OK to blend them together a bit.

There is also a chain of religious tradition that connects us today with our forebearers in the faith, and I’m conscious of trying to remain faithful to that tradition, even if I’m adding a new link to it.

The googling also brought to my attention that a chain is a unit of measurement primarily used by surveyors. Do you know why there are 5,280 feet in a mile? Because there are exactly 80 chains in a mile (one chain is 66 feet). And did you know why there are 43,560 square feet in an acre (or that there are that many??)? Because its standard size was one chain wide and ten chains long (66 x 660 = 43,560). So I like the connotation that The Sacred Chain is a divinely apportioned measurement of some sort.

Then the real kicker was finding out that it is exactly one chain (66 ft) between the stumps on a cricket pitch. For the majority of Americans who don’t know what those words mean, a “pitch” is what the Brits call a field on which sports are played, and “cricket” is one of those quintessentially British sports during which everyone stops to have tea. I learned the basic rules of the game when my family took a trip to Oxford one summer for a fellowship I had there, and we were renting (I should say “letting”) an apartment (I mean a “flat”) from a family. We met them for an afternoon and decided to let the kids run off some energy in the backyard (er, “garden”).

They had a cricket set and got a pretty big laugh about our last name and our three kids, because the “stumps” in cricket are the three poles that are driven into the ground and on top of which the bales are balanced (there was some attempt to line up the kids and balance a stick on top of them, but they were at the ages where their significant height differences made this impossible). The batter stands in front of this contraption, collectively called a “wicket”, and tries to protect the bales from being knocked off the stumps by the bowler on the other team who throws a ball at them. Exactly one chain away is another set of stumps the batter runs to when the ball is hit.

It seemed just too good that ChatGPT would come up with a title that had a connection to my last name. So I asked Dara if she had given it any information about me being the author. Sadly she had not. But we decided to go with it, thinking the novelty of collaborating with artificial intelligence might also catch some attention from publishers.

[aside] Now, of course, it’s not so catchy. People assume most written material is generated by artificial intelligence. In fact, this whole article was written by ChatGPT.

[aside within an aside]: That was a joke. I’m actually writing this (or maybe I asked ChatGPT to write an article as though someone is funnily suggesting that ChatGPT wrote it as a way of throwing people off from the fact that ChatGPT actually wrote it?).

The publisher also liked it, and I ended up rewriting some sections of the text to tie into it a bit better. But we still needed a subtitle. The one ChatGPT came up with was “Evolution and the Meaning of Life.” That seemed a little too grandiose. I haggled back and for with the editor for quite some time, and we finally settled on: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith.

It’s on the longer side, but it has a nice rhythm to it (go ahead and say it out loud). And it really captures the central point of the book. I’m not simply trying to make the case that accepting the science of evolution can be done grudgingly or if you gerrymander some crucial aspects of faith. Rather, I’m trying to show that when you really understand the science, it pushes your faith to a deeper, more authentic place. The science makes you realize that some elements of faith didn’t really make that much sense, and there is a better way of understanding those things.

Anyway, that’s the story of the title. I’ll tease some of the meat of the book in future posts. Thanks for reading.