Welcome to season six of Gospelbound! I love hearing that you’ve missed the podcast. I’ve been reading all summer and recording interviews this last month. I can’t wait for you to hear from guests including Tim Keller, Rebecca McLaughlin, Philip Yancey, Jay Kim, Scott Sauls, Sarah Zylstra, and others.

We open this season with the most memorable book I’ve read this year. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll shout hallelujah. It’s hard to describe the exact experience of reading Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad Is Untrue. I can’t say I’ve read anything like it before. It’s a coming-of-age memoir. It’s a Christian testimony. It’s a refugee’s inside look at religion and geopolitics. It’s the anguished cry of a boy separated from his father and the only world he knew and loved—a world that he’s not even sure he can remember.

Writing as his younger self lends tension and anguish to Nayeri’s already dramatic story of escape from Iran. Daniel’s mother is the hero of this book, which released in 2020 and was named a book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal. Her conversion was a death sentence in Iran, so the family fled—without her baffled husband. Rarely have I read such a powerful witness to the power of the gospel outside the Bible, let alone in a book so widely acclaimed in mainstream literary circles.

Daniel Nayeri joined me on Gospelbound to discuss love, justice, eschatology, literature, and his theological debt to Tim Keller as a long-time member of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.