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I feel a little like I’ve gotten away with something here. Any book is a feat. A good book is even harder, and depends on a staggering amount of generosity, good will, creativity, and collaboration. I tried to write a good book and also a strange one. It’s a history of novels. It’s an American studies project undertaken by an American in Germany at a German university and it is deeply interdisciplinary, at a time when academia has decided it cannot afford thinking that happens in multiple categories at once. This book attempts to show the complexity of the architecture of American evangelicalism, insisting that the weird side doors, the stairway that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and the rooms that appear not to connect are not incidental to the structure, but important to understanding what it is. There are good reasons to think that kind of book shouldn’t work. I was told a bunch of times over the years why it wouldn’t, and that it didn’t fit, and also that there wasn’t a place for me. That seems eminently reasonable when I think about it. But it also makes me incredibly grateful for the many, many people—really it is astonishing how many—who saw the weird thing I was trying to do and responded with enthusiasm, encouragement, and joy. Again and again, without a thought of how or whether they’d be acknowledged, much less rewarded, people gave their time, talent, and skill to make this book better and make it real. Now that I’m done, the finished product feels like nothing so much as a magic trick that I don’t know how I did, which is just a way of saying it was accomplished through a million acts of generosity and even more of grace. Thank you.

Thank you Jan Stievermann, my doctoral supervisor, who started this project with a simple question about why Left Behind was fiction and what readers were doing when they read a novel about the apocalypse instead of a political or theological tract about the apocalypse. Your integrity, rigor, and intellectual honesty are unmatched and I’m proud to call you my doktorvater and my friend.

Thanks to the Stievermanners who were in it with me in Heidelberg, especially Jennifer Adams-Massmann, Heike Jablonski, Ryan Hoselton, and Johanna Müller.

Thanks to the scholars who supported me even when it didn’t seem like there would be anything in it for them. Academia is bad for the soul, but you valued higher things. I want to especially name Timothy E.W. Gloege, Matthew Avery Sutton, Darren Dochuk, Heath Carter, Mark Noll, Kathryn Lofton, Kate Bowler, and Kristen Kobes Du Mez.

Thanks to my conversation partners in the University of Notre Dame’s Colloquium on Religious and History: Jonathan Riddle, Phillip Byers, Suzanna Krivulskaya, and Benjamin Wetzel, as well as Peter Cajka and Philipp Gollner. That was a terrible year for me, redeemed a little by your kindnesses and collaborative spirit.

Thank you to the people who made the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellows Program possible, especially Joe Creech, Mark Schwehn, Dorothy Bass, and Joe Goss. And a huge thanks to my fellow Lillies: Chelsea Wagenaar, Elizabeth Fredericks, Pat Gardner, Ashleigh Elser, Christine Hedlin, Jason Gehrke, and Jillian Snyder. You can’t know how much it meant to me and I miss you every Monday at 4.

I also want to thank the friends who made sure I knew I was worth more than what I wrote in a day. You made my life so much better: Shawn Huelle, Johanna Roering, Tyler and Shalynn Crawford, Pam and Nathan Heald, Chris Godwin, Emily and Max Bartenbach, Erin Mehaffey Harper, Julia Kopp, Tony Cole, and especially my sister Valerie.

Thanks to my editor David Bratt, marketing director Laura Hubers, and the folks at Eerdmans, who bought into this project with such enthusiasm.

And thank you, most of all, to my wife Beth. Your belief in this work from beginning to end has astounded me. Your love means everything. And remember when you got me the best cat? That was a good day and there have been so many good days.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you all.