Writing "By What Power" by Eric C. Smith

How do ancient scriptures and today's front-page news connect? Eric C. Smith, a professor at Iliff School of Theology and author of By What Power: The Book of Acts, Autocracy, and the Power of Resistance, shares  how writing a complete manuscript in just three weeks at an oceanside winter retreat helped bring his vision to life.

Do you have a moment when you realized “this needs to be a book?” I teach and write about the Book of Acts in my life as a professor, and I kept noticing how relevant the stories from Acts were to the headlines I was reading every day. I would read in Acts about ethnic prejudice and then hear about draconian immigration roundups on the news. I would read about nationalist outbursts in Acts and then hear about White nationalists on the news. I would read in Acts about the way Paul was imprisoned for years just because it benefited someone else to keep him there, and then I would hear about the ways the American criminal justice system is broken and the ways we can’t seem to build prisons fast enough for all the people we want to lock up. And I just put two and two together. I realized that Acts was telling us something important about the past, but that it was also telling us something familiar for our own time and place, and that the lessons contained in the Book of Acts could be useful for those of us living here and now. This book came out of that juxtaposition—the past and the present. 

How long did it take you to write the manuscript? What is your writing process? What routines helped you create the time to create and write your book? I wrote this book in about three weeks in December of 2025. Because I’m a full-time professor, a part-time minister, and a part-time writer and student of writing, it can be hard to make a big project like this a regular part of my routine. So I crowdfunded a writing retreat (you’ll find the contributors thanked in the acknowldgements) and holed up in an oceanside house and did my best to disconnect from as many of my regular professional duties as possible. I’ve used that same process several times now, and it’s very effective for me. I spend a lot of time beforehand thinking about the book and organizing it in my head and sometimes in outline form. And then when I’m on the actual writing retreat I set a quota for myself—how many words I need to write each day. For this book it was between 3,000 and 5,000 words a day, with a day off for editing and rewriting thrown in about once a week. And of course there was still a ton of work to be done afterwards, but at the end of those three weeks I had a complete draft of the book. There’s something about how deserted the shore is in winter that makes writing come easily to me. 

What do you hope readers will take away from your book? I have an audience in mind for By What Power. In my head, the ideal reader of this book will already believe that the Bible is important, and they will already think that a text like the Book of Acts has something to teach us today. What I hope readers will take away, then, is a kind of transfer of concern. If you’re reading Acts and you’re getting angry on Paul’s behalf at the way he’s being treated, then I think you should also feel angry about the way many people are being treated today. If you’re reading Acts and noticing how the government officials seem to act with impunity and without much concern for doing their job well, then I think you should notice the same thing about America in 2026. If you’re reading Acts and feeling inspired at the sense of community and common purpose that the first Christians shared, then why not try to create something like that here and now, even if one of America’s political parties would try to call that “socialism”? Why not try to live the way those folks tried to live, and treat each other with goodness and fairness? I hope readers will take from this book the courage to call out the injustices that are flourishing in our own day, and the creativity to imagine a different—and dare I say more Christ-like—way to live.

What was the biggest challenge of writing your book? I grew up in the evangelical subculture of the 1990s, and I know that world pretty well. As I was writing By What Power, I could almost hear the objections of people from that world—many of whom are still friends of mine—as I made some of my claims. So I did my best to make this a book about patterns and systems, and not about any one politician or party. The book is not a takedown of anyone, but it’s a way of pointing out how authoritarian governments work and how autocrats operate, and then pointing out that we are living in a time like that, when authoritarianism is thriving and autocrats are getting stronger. Right now, that’s happening, right in front of us. That’s the piece that I worried was going to make people angry, and I’m sure it will. But it’s the truth, and I sometimes think about how shameful it would be to live through a time like this one, and be in a position to say something, and never say it. So that was a challenge, but it’s one I knew I had to overcome.

 What are you reading now – for work, for fun, for personal growth? My midlife crisis is that I’m trying to get better at writing. I have always admired long-form journalists, memoirists, and poets, and I’m trying to spend this season of my life learning lessons from writers like that and applying them to my work. There’s some of that in By What Power: trying to tell a story well, trying to choose the right words for the right ideas. So I’m reading a lot of nature writing (Martha Park, Margaret Renkl, Robert Macfarlane), a lot of essays (W.G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, Joan Didion), and a lot of poignant memoir (Scott McClanahan, Mary Karr, Lacy Johnson, Eula Biss). I spend a lot of my professional life reading books about religion, but I’m finding as much or more religion in those kinds of books—the ones that are simply trying to communicate human experience and make sense of it. 

What’s one of your favorite passages from the book? In chapter 6 I describe meeting a woman whom I call Maria. Maria is one of millions of people swept up in immigration raids and imprisoned in a sometimes-maddening, often-cruel system of immigration detention. She’s exactly who we should want to welcome into our country, in my opinion, and she’s exactly who the current administration demonizes every single day. It was an honor to tell her story (with her permission, anonymized to protect her as much as possible), and I hope by telling it I can help people understand that if you’re rooting for Paul and Peter and Stephen and John in the Book of Acts, you ought to be rooting for Maria in the United States of America.