Betsy Childs says Mark Bertrand (who does not go by Russell, if you happened to pick up that nasty rumor) doesn’t write Christian Fiction. “Bertrand’s allegiance is to his genre, characters, and plot, not to a fictional conversion narrative or religious epiphany. He’s just writing good crime fiction.”

That very author is taking issue with another author, Mark Twain, who charges Sir Walter Scott with laying the groundwork for the American Civil War. “… when Twain decided to take up the mantle of Cervantes and skewer medieval chivalry, it was a Connecticut Yankee and not a Southern Gentleman he had to send back in time. The Southerner, presumably, would have been right at home and all too pleased to leave things as he found them.”

That seems simplistic to me, but books do condition minds. Perhaps Twain’s argument is a good one to some extent. Many other ideas bore their fruit in this time as well. Scott didn’t dehumanize people, did he? That idea came from outside Ivanhoe.