Notre Dame, Indiana. When I was the Director of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (2010-2017), one of my favorite events was hosting discussions of new books by faculty, fresh and bright and often cutting edge writing by talented faculty at all stages of their careers.

In preparation for the book events, one of my favorite questions to the author was, How did you come to write this particular book? Given your expertise, the range of things you can write on, how did you narrow it down to the theme/s developed in the 200-300 pages of this book? The question was...