Monday, February 27, 2017

One catchy sentence on undesigned coincidences

For a long time I've wanted a catchy, one-sentence answer to, "What is an undesigned coincidence?" Necessarily, a one-sentence, catchy answer is going to give the other person only a vague notion of what a UC is. One is going to have to go on to say more, and probably give a short example. But if I'm being interviewed out loud (e.g., for radio), I want to have a sentence to *start* with in answer to this natural question. With the release date of my book this week and one radio interview already in the works (I will be interviewed by Frank Turek this week for CrossExamined and the interview aired later on), I want to have something ready on this front.
What do people think of this? 

An undesigned coincidence is an incidental connection between accounts that points to truth.

I'm repressing my grammar Nazi urge to say "between or among," because there might be more than two! "Incidental" is meant to do duty both for the fact that UCs usually concern ancillary details and the fact that they appear casual and unplanned. I could add "that doesn't seem to have been planned," but that makes the sentence less of a soundbite. Thoughts?

4 comments:

Ed Hansberry said...

Will there be a kindle version of the book? Amazon only has paper showing today.

Lydia McGrew said...

No Kindle version is currently in the works. However, I have hopes that the publisher will do a Kindle version eventually. The last I heard they are considering bringing one out a year from now. For the moment I own the electronic rights to the text, but I want to let the print version get well-launched, and in any event I would prefer if a publisher brought out a Kindle version rather than my doing it. So hopefully in about a year we will do a new contract that includes the e-pub, Kindle, etc., rights.

Aron said...

I curious about how technical this book gets. Do you get into probability theory?

Lydia McGrew said...

Nope, no probability theory at all. It's a crossover book for laymen and scholars in New Testament studies, written at a level the layman can understand but should be of interest to scholars as well. We'd like to see it picked up as a textbook in Bible colleges and seminaries.