Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Fiction

Rage Against the Darkness: The Dark Harvest Trilogy

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The first book of Jeremiah W. Montgomery‘s Dark Harvest trilogy tells us of a dark religion once thought to be dead, but now it has developed a following and gathered significant strength. A monk leads a translation team on a project to put Scripture in the language of these emerging pagans. J. Mark Bertrand praised The Dark Faith as being “full of adventure, dread, and dark conspiracy.” Douglas Bond calls the series “an imaginative warning against the relentless scheme of the enemy to erode truth and leave a barren hulk in its wake.”

I asked Mr. Montgomery, who is pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church (OPC) in State College, Pennsylvania, a few questions about his series and himself.

1. Tell us about your Dark Harvest trilogy. Would you give something of your main character’s story arc?

The Dark Harvest trilogy follows several young men – and one young lady – through the currents of interlocking conspiracies in a world much like early medieval Europe. There is no single main character, but the first volume focuses on a monk with a talent for languages. Placed on academic assignment in a foreign monastery, he soon finds himself inextricably tangled in a web of ecclesiastical and political intrigue – a web walked by dark spiders from his past.

2. You have published two of three books so far, right? Is the third book on track to being published?

The Dark Faith was released in September 2012, followed by The Scarlet Bishop in July 2013. The final volume, The Threefold Cord, is finished and expected in July 2014.

3. How have these books been received? Are you pleased with how you’ve been able to get the word out and find readers?

There is a grittiness to the stories that has attracted some criticism. Nevertheless, I have been pleased with the books’ overall reception. I cannot say how widely they are read, but from what I’ve seen most readers seem to enjoy them.

4. These are epic fantasy, right? Or are they historic fantasy?

 Continue reading Rage Against the Darkness: The Dark Harvest Trilogy →

Authors, Religion

Mahaney, Harris leave The Gospel Coalition

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World magazine reports on the civil suit against a former member of a church once led by C. J. Mahaney and now by Joshua Harris. Last week a jury found the man guilty of molesting three boys in the 1980s, and questions have come up about whether church leaders, not just these two men but many more, knew about the problem and did not report it or handle it properly. Harris believes he should take full responsibility for part of the mishandling and has asked for a leave of absence along with four other church leaders. He steps down from The Gospel Coalition, he says, “because I don’t want the present challenges at my church to distract from this terrific ministry.”

Harris comes at the end of this case and appears to be taking the high ground. He has even talked about suffering abuse as a child himself. I’m less sure about what high ground Mahaney can take at this point. Here’s a report from last year about his part in the lawsuit. At the time, evangelical leaders were rallying to his support, saying they stood by him and “his personal integrity.”

I can make no judgment call here. It’s difficult for anyone at this distance to sort the facts and accuse these men, and we don’t have to. Let’s pray for them and their congregations. Let’s do what we can in our own churches and cities to protect each other and call people to account for their sins in godly ways.

The Gospel Coalition (newly redesigned) has a couple links on this subject:

Authors, Fiction

Yasushi Inoue, Japanese Master

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“In a magisterial study of Japanese history, culture and psyche, Mirror, Sword and Jewel, Kurt Singer wrote: ‘The Japanese language is rich in ambiguities, a tool more for withholding and eluding than expressing or stating.’ Where does this leave the translator, given the task of bridging the language gap?”

Nonetheless, Lee Langley recommends two novels by Yasushi Inoue, a Japanese master novelist: The Hunting Gun and Bullfight. Of course, your mileage may vary. Here’s a snippet:

“I longed to devote my life to something valuable with a fervor that would consume my being. Young people today probably think the same way. But in our time we were not left to ourselves as they are. All of us believed in some kind of god. We believed in a scholar or in scholarship itself; we believed that right actually exists. All that kind of thing has been swept away, and philosophy, religion and morality must be created anew, from the ground up.”(via Prufrock)

Authors, Publishing

John C. Wright on the death of freedom in Science Fiction

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By way of our friend Anthony Sacramone (I’d link to his blog, but he’s in one of his hiatuses. Hiati?) an excellent article from Intercollegiate Review, “Heinlein, Hugos and Hogwash,” by John C. Wright concerning the sad state of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, an organization from which I have also withdrawn:

The purpose of all this hogwash is not to aid the plight of minorities. The purpose is power. The purpose is terror.

One need not ignite a suicide-bomb to enact a reign of terror. One need only have the power to hurt a man’s reputation or income, and be willing to use the power in an arbitrary, treacherous, lunatic, and cruel fashion. For this, the poisonous tongue suffices.

At one time, science fiction was an oasis of intellectual liberty, a place where no idea was sacrosanct and no idea was unwelcome. Now speculative fiction makes speculative thinkers so unwelcome that, after a decade of support, I resigned my membership in SFWA in disgust. SFWA bears no blame for all these witch-hunts, or even most; but SFWA spreads the moral atmosphere congenial to the witch-hunters, hence not congenial to my dues money.

Read it all here.

Authors, Non-fiction

Interview with the New York Yankees’ Mariano Rivera

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The greatest relief pitcher of all time, Mariano Rivera, shares his extraordinary story in The Closer. It’s a pleasant, personal tale about a Panamanian son of a fisherman who found he could pitch pretty well. He signed on with the NY Yankees for $2,000 and still didn’t quite understand that he would have to leave for Tampa, Florida.

Q. You’ve given us the remarkable story of your life in baseball with this book, The Closer. Would you mind telling us what you were thinking in those first days of spring training with the Gulf Coast Yankees in 1990?

A. I was surrounded by guys who were stronger than me and threw harder than me, and I was outperforming them. I was thinking, “How on earth am I doing this?” I was getting results that were far beyond my physical abilities. It had to be the Lord’s work.

I have to thank my first catcher and good friend, Claudino Hernandez, for seeing my potential. When I was on the training field with Tim Rumer, Russ Springer, Brian Faw, and others, I wasn’t as fast or as strong as they were, but I could do one thing better than just about anybody else. It was the thing Claudino saw I could do at the try-outs. I could put the ball exactly where I wanted it.

Q. You’ve said several times that you try to keep it simple. Is that how you made it through your career, just keeping it simple?

A. You could say that. Life is hard and humbling. I do all I can to keep it simple and to pray to the Lord for clarity and wisdom, so that His will and His perfect goodness will guide me and keep me safe. The Bible will tell you everything about how I try to live. For me, it is not just the word of God, but a life road map that is packed with wisdom that you cannot beat. It has this kind of simple wisdom: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

You know how many times I’ve gone out to the mound thinking, “This guy has no shot, because I am Mariano Rivera?” Never. The guy with the bat in his hand is a professional. He is trying just as hard to get a hit as I am trying to get him out. I respect that, and I know everything I have is from the Lord.

When I was sent back to the Columbus Clippers after pitching a few games for the Yankees, I had two weeks of rest and then started pitching faster than ever before. My catcher, Jorge Posada, asked me what I was eating, because I jumped from throwing 88 to 96 mph that game. I know of only one answer. It was a gift from the Lord. The cutter I throw, my fastball with a wicked tail on it, wasn’t something I studied and practiced for years. The Lord gave it to me, and it changed my whole career.

Everything is in his hands. I do not take it for granted. It was the way I wanted to pitch, and it is the way I want to live. Put everything we have into living this moment the best way we can live it. Some players obsess over rumors, but for me, they are only distractions. In my worldview as a pitcher, distractions are the enemy. Again, simple is best. Continue reading Interview with the New York Yankees’ Mariano Rivera →

Authors, Religion

Osteenification of American Religion

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Hank Hanegraaff must have read all of Joel Osteen’s books, because he quotes them all in this article on Osteen’s heresies.

Osteen is the hip new personification of God-talk in America… Behind Osteenian self-affirmations—“I am anointed,” “I am prosperous,” “My God is a ‘supersizing God’”—there lies a darker hue. Behind the smile is a robust emphasis on all that is negative. If you are healthy and wealthy, words created that reality. However, if you find yourself in dire financial straits, contract cancer, or, God forbid, die an early death, your words are the prime suspect. Says Osteen, “We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying. And this can be good or it can be bad” (Discover the Champion in You, May 3, 2004). In evidence, he cites one illustration after the other. One in particular caught my attention: the story of a “kind and friendly” worker at the church. He died at an early age, contends Osteen, “being snared by the words of his mouth” (I Declare [FaithWords, 2012], viii–ix).

That snare is meant to be an application of Proverbs 6:1-2, but read those verses to see if you get the same application as Osteen does.

Hanegraaff says Osteen’s gospel is a version of New Thought Metaphysics, the idea that our words are a force of magic in the real world. In Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now, he writes, “You have to begin speaking words of faith over your life. Your words have enormous creative power. The moment you speak something out you give birth to it. This is a spiritual principle, and it works whether what you are saying is good or bad, positive or negative.”

Hanegraaff has written on this at length in his new book, The OSTEENification of American Christianity, which is available for a gift of any amount to the Christian Research Institute.

Authors, Poetry, Writing

Words: They’re What’s For Breakfast!

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  • Previous edited stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald are being released without the content edits. “Before these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post,” James West, general editor of the Cambridge edition of Fitzgerald’s work, said. He believes the stories make more sense without the tempered language. “One of the commonplaces of Fitzgerald criticism, for decades, has been that he avoided unpleasant topics and realistic language in his magazine fiction. We can see now that this was not altogether his choice.”
  • If Eskimos have 50 words for snow and 70 words for ice, do they experience these things more richly than the rest of us? Do their words shape their world? John H. McWhorter says not quite. We can think about concepts for which we have no words, and our world isn’t really shaped by our use of language. “…language has only a minor effect on cognition and no effect on a person’s view of the world—that is, in this case, how humans understand time, causality, color, space, and so forth.” Reports about studies that supposedly show the opposing view are exaggerated.
  • Crossway Books is throwing a sale in celebration of Crazy Busy winning Book of the Year.
  • The only measure of a writer is that you want to remember his words.
Authors, Music, Religion

Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay Apologizes, Offers Context

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The lead singer of Jars of Clay, one of my favorite bands, cannonballed the Twitter pool repeatedly this week with commits and questions on gay marriage. Dan Haseltine asked if ruling out gay marriage was really as bad as many say it is. I’m tempted to reenact the drama for you. I got caught up in it somewhat. I saw Dan’s tweet splash down: “I don’t particularly care about Scriptures stance on what is “wrong.” I care more about how it says we should treat people,” and my heart sank.

But yesterday, Dan explained the context of his tweets, what he was trying to say, and how he messed it all up. He says he came from a panel discussion on gay marriage in Australia last week where many things were said that provoked him. He hadn’t thought about it much before, so on Twitter, not the best platform for this, he wanted to ask questions outside of his own box, to assume he didn’t have all the answers and to wonder where his blind spots were, if any. And he said things that easily misrepresent his views.

It’s encouraging. I like this guy and his music. One of his recent songs says we “don’t know enough about love, so we make it up.” It seems to call our current sexual chaos into question. Some of us talk love but we don’t know anything about it. In one of his books, Jared C. Wilson notes that God is love, but love is not God. We can’t define love however we feel is right and then say that’s god. It doesn’t work that way.

I feel we’re in a similar situation with homosexuality and the civil marriage debate. Continue reading Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay Apologizes, Offers Context →

Authors, Writing

Two Authors To Write 30 Days Live On Podcast

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Indie Authors Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant have obtained funding for a live writing exposition through their podcast. “‘Fiction Unboxed’ is a publishing experiment. Platt and Truant are full-time authors, determined to prove with their Kickstarter project that well-told stories can bloom from excitement and inspiration, rather than from a ‘true artist’s’ tortured soul.”

They are doing this, naturally, by torturing themselves for a month.

Apropos of nothing, here’s an audio skit.

Authors

Shakespeare’s Dictionary?

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Two booksellers are making a case for the authorship of notes in John Baret‘s An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie, published in 1580. They hope to prove that the marginalia is Shakespeare’s. They have scanned the 300-page dictionary to open it up to the world for review and possible help.