While the book includes only Christian authors, Monroe said, "it's a celebration of diversity in a lot of ways."

Monroe said that the starting point for the book was to approach the topic from a Christian point of view, not to do a survey of many religions.

"The book isn't a defense of Christianity," she said. "It's just honest life stories which shed some light on God's search for us."

Monroe said she chose to focus her book on Harvard for many reasons.

"It's always sort of set the pace of cultural orthodoxy and it was the first college called godless," Monroe said. "We had four suicides and a murder last year. We are a college that needs to be honest enough to hear all possibilities about hope and meaning. And maybe in doing that raise the level of dialogue in classrooms at and far beyond Harvard."

The idea behind the book also spawned the Veritas Forum of 1994, which brought many of the writers together in person to discuss some of the issues of the anthology.

The forum will meet again this October for a formal launching of the book.