June 2008
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2008.
Read an Excerpt of Spero
"Spero is an imaginative fantasy that subtly instructs, entertains, and intellectually provokes the reader. It is fascinating reading. I'm definitely hooked on this series." Jean Heimann at Catholic Fire.
"...intelligent as well as inspiring..." Terry Barga at whattodoabout.com.
Please visit www.birthpangs.com/cart to buy Spero
(and Fidelis) from the author or to buy from Amazon.com
Fidelis, my first book, is Latin for faithfulness. The second book,
Spero, is Latin for hope. Spero is an exploration of what hope is and why we need it. It is an exploration of what things are good to put our hope in and what things are bad to put our hope in. In the fictionalized America of the future portrayed in the Birth Pangs series, all of the things that people have traditionally put their hope in have been brought low. There are no government agencies, no schools, and not even churches. In the face of daily perils, people have to figure out how where they are going to place their hope.
It is interesting to me that the political candidate running on 'hope' is also running on 'change.' I think this illustrates the root of the problem. The best place to put your 'hope' is where it won't shift beneath your feet. Also, we need to be clear about what things we hope to overcome. Nearly all of our systems and institutions are geared to address certain day to day realities that are important but not, I'm afraid, ultimate. There is one problem that surpasses them all: death.
Spero is about people- even good people- putting their hope in lesser means to tackle lesser problems and being confronted with the consequences of that approach.
Spero is about being confronted with our chief problem and challenged to consider what possible solutions there might be to that problem... and whether any of these are within our control, or obtainable by our own effort.
Is politics an important part of your world? Should I be searching for hints about the way you feel about capitalism or democracy, or should I be looking past these things as the ’superficial’ layer of relationships, looking for a deeper reflection on civilization in general?
Political systems really represent individual beliefs, in particular how one’s beliefs impact how one should behave in the wider world and how you believe others ought to behave. Ultimately, one cannot separate one’s politics from their worldview. Since the Birth Pangs series is an exploration of worldviews, it follows that political musings will come, too. A person who derives no political implications from their world view probably doesn’t even understand their world view or doesn’t really believe their world view.
Part of the problem in today’s culture is that many people have a worldview but then political beliefs that are inconsistent with planks in their worldview. The latent idea is that one’s beliefs are private matters whereas how one feels about the government or governance is in a separate category. Of course, one’s feelings about politics is in fact a belief, so even the attempt to compartmentalize fails in the end. Somewhere, somehow, people’s politics relate back to a belief or two that they have. Much of the heated discourse today arises because people from different political bents cannot trace their political ideas back to their core beliefs and then they present their political assertions as matters of self-evidently true, which of course they are not if you come from a different starting point. Read the rest of this entry »
