Author John Coleman Talks Latest Book: ‘It Reaffirmed My Belief in Miracles’
By Moveiguide® Staff
In January, author and speaker John Coleman announced the release of his first novel, ‘Miracles,’ a fictional exploration of how people would respond to miracles today.
“‘Miracles’ is my first novel and the idea is to explore what it would look like for people to encounter miracles in the modern world,” Coleman told Movieguide® in a recent interview.
According to the book’s synopsis, the story follows a reporter named Jaime Halasz, who receives a new assignment about a ‘outbreak’ of miracles in Atlanta, GA.
“As the seemingly supernatural events pile up, she’s skeptical. But when she witnesses the miraculous events herself, she’s thrust into the center of the story that will make or break everything she’s been working for,” the synopsis reads. “What will it take to believe in these miracles and the man behind them? And even if Jaime can trust him, what happens to her story—and his future—when some believers turn their backs?”
Coleman said that research sparked his interest in writing the novel.
“I really started to think about writing the novel when I went down a rabbit hole online, thinking about if really miraculous things or supernatural things were happening today, wouldn’t we see it on YouTube? Wouldn’t we see it on TikTok or Facebook or Instagram? As everyone has a smartphone now, and all of that’s ubiquitous, wouldn’t it be incontrovertible that these things are happening?”
However, Coleman said that today’s response to miracles would mirror how people responded to miracles when Jesus walked the earth.
“I realized that the question isn’t, ‘Would there be witnesses, but how would the world respond to that ff the evidence were presented?’” he said. “What I started to think was, the response wouldn’t be what you think it would be. We all think if you can start to see supernatural, miraculous things happening and people could testify to it, we’d all believe it. Instead, I think that would actually be divisive, that people would respond to it in radically different ways.”
“The book is me following different characters as they try to react to the miraculous happening around them in a way that I think would be realistic in our modern times,” he added. “If you really think about Jesus’s time, even when he was performing miracles in front of people, people reacted very differently. I honestly think we’d see the same thing if they were happening today.”
Coleman added that the lack of representations of faith and prayer in the mainstream media motivated him to write ‘Miracles.’
“In the mainstream world, in all of this quality fiction that we’re getting now, whether it be on TV or in writing, you just rarely see accurate portrayals of religious faith of people,” he said. “We’re experiencing all these post-apocalyptic or apocalyptic TV shows, for example, and you almost never see people praying even though 80% of the world effectively follows some religious tradition.”
“It’s central to who people are, we even saw it with Damar Hamlin, when he had his medical emergency in the NFL,” he explained. “People’s first reaction was prayer. Yet, if you turn on a TV show about that incident, if someone were making it up, no one would react that way.”
Aside from real-world examples, Coleman said that he drew inspiration from several non-fiction books on miracles, such as Lee Strobel’s ‘The Case for Miracles,’ or the works of Craig Keener.
Despite his theological knowledge and research, Coleman wanted to approach the story from the perspective of a non-believer.
“Very simply, I think miracles are divine intervention in everyday life. It’s something happening that’s outside the bounds of what we would consider the natural world in everyday life,” he said. “I tried to write it almost as a non-Christian book, because one of my goals here is not to just kind of preach to the choir in the Christian world, but to really write a book that could be accessible to all; whether you’re a Christian or not.”
While Coleman hopes that ‘Miracles’ will force readers to think—Christians and non-Christians alike—he said that the writing process also changed his perspective on the subject of miracles.
“Overall, the headline would be this reaffirmed my belief in miracles, and the idea that miraculous things can happen,” he said of the writing process. “I think it really broadened my perspective about what that can mean.”
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