The author describes his approach to retelling Arthurian legends, where he wrote two stories in tandem: one a historical novel in which a boy, eager to serve as a squire and to go on crusade, is given a piece of obsidian, the other of stories, the Arthurian legends, that this boy sees in the obsidian. These became a trilogy. He states that while it may sound obvious to say that in writing his Arthurian trilogy, he researched thoroughly, yet gave free reign to his imagination, it isn't entirely obvious, because he aimed to be so deeply in a time and place that his own ideas became truly consistent with it. In the course of writing his Arthurian trilogy, the author grappled with the following serious issues, seeing parallels between those times and the present: (1) the umbrella presence of a fundamentalist Church preaching that the Muslims were vile pagans who should be driven out of Jerusalem and exterminated, and offering pardon without penance to any man who took the Cross and joined the crusades for one year; (2) hatred of Jews; (3) social inequality and the lack of social mobility; (4) dislike and distrust of women; and (5) the legitimized and glorified violence in Arthurian legend. Certain recurring and topical values helped shape the story: leadership, or the lack of it; a sense of duty versus the lack of it; and compassion, or the lack of it. Rather than give away any intellectual or emotional currency by being an absolutist or fundamentalist, the author sought to create a character who, without stepping outside the boundaries of his own time, questions and keeps questioning (as Merlin has encouraged him to do) and never accepts the easy hand-me-down. In a world scarcely less divided and scarred than his own, the Christian Arthur recognizes "we all need each other;" and, like Muslims and Jews, he concludes that "each one of us makes a difference." This article contains a list of works cited and mentioned, the titles in the author's Arthur Trilogy, and additional titles by the author.