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Posted by Anthony on February 24, 2009
Thomas Powell’s recent article at Townhall called “A Fatal Trajectory” was featured on Rush Limbaugh today. When I got home I found some friends talking about it, too. I thought Powell’s piece hit the nail on the proverbial head.
Here is a quote I want to comment briefly on:
Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.
How did we get to this point? It was no single thing.
The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of “non-judgmental” affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.
The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair.
These are themes that I have been covering in my apologetics ministry. To counter the ignorance regarding Christianity my ministry launched an online apologetics academy. ‘Non-judgmental’ affectations are covered every week on this blog. As for the ‘poisonous propaganda’ my ministry’s Christian writing contest is geared specifically to spur on Christian authors so that they can help turn the tide from the midst of the very belly of the beast. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on October 10, 2008
I expect any honest person investigating the current economic mess will already know that the current crisis is due to government entangling with the mortgage industry. I expect that any objective onlooker won’t try to pin this on President Bush. Not solely, anyway. My feeling as I watch what is going on is basically this: “I told you so.”
Whatever power the government has to help you is proportionately available to hurt you. The hope that with the right people at the helm hurt can be avoided is naive at best: implemented at the national level, it is dangerous. As we survey various government programs over the last century we see that virtually none of them are working as promised and many of them are hobbling along. This includes Social Security, the ‘War on Poverty,’ the Department of Education, FEMA (think Katrina), and… the dabbling in the mortgage industry.
If I was to blame Bush for anything, it would be that he followed the precedent set by earlier presidents (even Reagan didn’t dismantle the Dept. of Education) and tried (is trying) to solve the current government caused problem with government sponsored solutions. If I was to blame McCain for anything, it would be that he also proposed ‘big government’ answers. I can’t be too hard on him since I think we all knew what we were getting with him as far as that goes, and besides, the precedent was set long ago, before most of us were born.
My question to the reader is simply this: how long are we going to continue putting our hope in the government to take care of our problems, large and small? What exactly will it take before even the liberals see the problem? Whatever that is, I fear that we are closer to it than we ever have been.
Now, I do not know how we could solve the current problem without government intervention but I think I would have liked to hear some proposals. I suspect that we are just shoring up a system placed on sand and the ultimate fix is to run it to ground and this time build on solid rock. Painful, to be sure. Another century of bandaids doesn’t seem like a good idea, either.
Incidentally, this all reminds me eerily of the preconditions that led up to the setting of my fictional book series, Birth Pangs. For anyone who thought it was too wild and outrageous to actually come about I ask them to reconsider…
(I may as well give the link to my book site since I mentioned it: www.birthpangs.com)
Posted by Anthony on August 29, 2008
Book 2 of my Birth Pangs series is due to be released on October 20th, 2008, in hard cover. The name: Spero. I am very pleased to be able to release the cover image, designed by my friends at SojournerDesign. Check it out.
The Birth Pangs website has had a make over, again with the help of SojournerDesign. Take a look at www.birthpangs.com. It still has a couple of rough edges but it is coming along nicely. Just a note: right now I am offering copies of both Fidelis and Spero available at a discount in celebration of the release of Spero. To get it at the cheaper rate you need to make your purchase or pre-purchase now. That offer expires Sept. 7th, 2008.
I haven’t talked much about what Spero is actually about. Let me say a few words now.
Spero is Latin for “I Hope” though for all I care you can just think of it as ‘hope.’ If you’re astue, you’ll catch that ‘Fidelis’ has something to do with ‘faith.’ Put it together, Faith, Hope, and…. the name of book three will have something to do with Love. 
The Birth Pangs series is set in the United States some time in the not too distant future. A small scale nuclear holocaust has taken place, followed by a devastating pandemic. The United States had been defeated in several humiliating wars, but now all oppressors are gone, basically leaving a state of anarchy. Fidelis charted the course of one character across this landscape. Spero will chart the course of another character. As you may guess, if the first book took ‘faith’ as one of its primary themes, Spero will take ‘hope’ as one of its primary themes.
Some other themes/events/issues besides ‘hope’ in Spero:
- Courage, Compassion, and Loyalty
- Adolescence
- Father/Son/Masculinity
- Sexual Purity
- Good and Evil
- Namehood
- Worldview/Ideology/Politics
- Ruminations on the Nature of Reality and Truth
- Coincidence and Predestination
- and a bunch of other stuff.
I would invite you to read the extended excerpt of Spero, which you may download in PDF by clicking that link.
Finally, spread the word. The Facebook group for it is located here. I have a couple of review copies available for the worthy blogger. Contact me with your pitch and get yourself an advanced copy.
Posted by Anthony on July 17, 2008
I am very pleased to announce that book 2 in the Birth Pangs series, Spero, will be released in hard cover on October 20th, 2008. The soft cover will be released around Thanksgiving, 2008.
I am very pleased to make available an extended excerpt of the book. You may download it below. Feel free to pass it along and share it!
Review copies are available. Email me at author@birthpangs.com. Please provide details about the venue that the review would be published in. Review copies can be purchased by fans for a limited time through this site.
Click here for an extended excerpt of Spero.
Posted by Anthony on May 25, 2008
I was handed a bunch of interview questions a while back and we actually had an audio interview but that interview is now lost in the hills of Argentina (I kid you not). I have been answering them one by one on my blog at www.birthpangs.com but this one (and a couple to come) I thought would be relevant here. You can read the other four questions and answers at the Birth Pangs site. Here, reprinted, is question five and my answer:
Why pick a post-nuclear war setting to explore these themes: first, the theme of human virtue and fortitude, and, second, the theme of ultimate truth?
Interestingly, what I wanted to do in the book decided this setting. I didn’t start out wanting to have a Mad Max landscape. A Mad Max landscape was the natural outgrowth of some of the purposes of the book. What I wanted to get at is a point where everything is stripped away leaving only individual people striving on their own, free from the structures of government, church, and civilization. There aren’t many plausible scenarios that can give you that and one of the things I wanted to remain is plausible. I know that there are fantastic elements to the book… but under my argument (slowly revealed over all the books), is that everything in the books can actually be true in our own world. So, how do we get from the world we are in now to a world in which every man has to fend for themselves, rebuilding what they believe and how they think free from peer influence? A post-apocalyptic setting is required, unless I want to have a completely fantastic Perelandra world.
Now, I wanted that setting to help lay out virtue and fortitude and even ultimate truth because I believe we take the crutches of society for granted. I am not saying that society’s influence is bad or improper, only that we shouldn’t take it for granted. We like to think of ourselves as good and righteous and brave people, but really, what would we be like if there was no policeman to think about or no armies to concern ourselves with? I think we need those curbs, but my point is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves about ourselves. We may only be civil because it is imposed on us. But what if those curbs weren’t in place?
If the curbs weren’t in place, we’d really find out the robustness of our virtues. We’d find out if we’d behave if there was no policeman to tell us to do so. We’d find out if we were brave when confronted with an injustice or a dastardly deed we had no policeman to call, but had to do something ourselves.
This ties in now with the question of ultimate truth. You don’t have anyone telling you what is right or true anymore, yet each and every one of us has an innate sense that there are right or true things, though we grasp at them and nearly always fail to meet our own standards, let alone the standards of others (think CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, the first chapter). What are you going to do? You can’t rely on authorities- authorities are gone.
In the Birth Pangs world, this is the real situation and the people struggle endlessly with them. But I do not think that our situation is much different. We still have to answer the same questions, only now we might say there are too many authorities, too many voices telling us what is true and real. Our problem is sorting them out and that basically requires the same process and methodology as starting over from ’scratch.’
I should say that I had wished to make a clean slate in the Birth Pangs world, with literally everything stripped away, but found that I couldn’t. The same principles I explore are the ones that demand that certain realities persist. There are still lingering tensions from past hates, for example. The UN has come in and taken away all of the guns, and a gunless world truly gives us an opportunity to be courageous and test our mettle, but I couldn’t realistically get rid of them all. That meant an on-going discussion about ‘gun rights’ which couldn’t be avoided. There are various political movements that surface that have their origins in our own times, and I couldn’t realistically suggest that they were completely gone, either. What to do about them forms a backdrop to the series.
Still, the main objective I think was reached: people found out what they were made of without the boundaries and crutches of ‘civilized’ society and likewise flail about for ideas on determining the source and nature of real truth.
Posted by Anthony on November 23, 2007
I was pretty thrilled to learn that a review of my book was going to be published on Worldnet as I bet any one can understand. Here is the article for those starting on my site and not coming from WND: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58834
Also, many thanks to Don Hank who took an interest in my book and my ministry a couple of months ago and has been a great encouragement to me. He is the author of the review.
My book, Fidelis is available both in hard covers and soft covers…
Soft Cover: $14.95 Hard Cover $24.95
You can purchase them from me at my website at www.birthpangs.com but both books are available on Amazon.com, too. Links to the Amazon pages are at Birthpangs.
