Blog Archives
The Re-Creation of Planet Earth and the Real Account of Life’s Beginnings
Have you ever wondered why there is such a huge discrepancy between what scientists say about the age of our planet and what the Bible says? According to scientists, the planet is 4.6 billion years old. Yet the Bible says that this planet Earth is only six thousand years old. But what if both were right? What if there was an analysis of creation that combined science with scripture in the search for truth—yielding a unique and provocative conclusion about life’s beginning?
In The Re-Creation of Planet Earth and the Real Account of Life’s Beginnings, author Brian Donnelly explores just this integration of science and biblical truth to provide a more realistic account of creation and re-creation. He addresses the ongoing debate between creation science and evolutionary biology, and he shows how creation is more viable than evolutionary theory and the big bang. The Re-Creation of the Planet Earth and the Real Account of Life’s Beginnings also speaks to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and it provides a detailed description of what heaven is like—an account supported by scripture and near-death experiences.
Having a complete view of creation, re-creation, heaven, and life’s beginnings will help you better understand how God relates to us today. But even more, this understanding can go on to help you see through the fog of the world and better relate to God as a believer.
A Dangerous Discovery
A Dangerous Discovery by Zachary Brock is a thrilling book about two men, Ace and Zeke. Ace had rough beginnings as he grew up on the streets of Latin America and had to do things as a child that no one should have to do. However, there was a chance encounter that completely changed his life and he is now reaping the rewards.
Together with his best friend and mentor Zeke, they run an international corporation, constantly enjoying the perks of wealth, social standing and luxurious travel. A new buyout of a company in Peru should run as normal, except this specific company has a secret that the Vatican will kill to protect.
Sounds awesome, hey! It sucked me right in. I love conspiracy theories about things like this and reading this book just feeds my obsession even more. It was a page turner simply because I was hooked on the Vatican stopping at nothing to protect this secret from coming out. You eventually discover why they stop at nothing and oh boy, is it a big secret.
There are two stories going on throughout the entire book but they eventually come together in the end, so it all works out. It was initially hard for me to keep track of at some stages, but that’s probably because I was reading it so quickly. I would have appreciated a clearer break between the two storylines. I think it would have been better if one chapter focused on one storyline and then switched in the next chapter. Which would help me keep track of the story while I was furiously tearing through pages.
I enjoyed the banter between Zeke and Ace. I found it funny, especially considering that the first chapter immediately throws you into a conversation where Zeke is anxious about ‘doing a sixty-nine’ with a girl he’s on a date with. He doesn’t even know what it means but that doesn’t stop Ace from being in hysterics. Reading the banter between the two of them was like hanging out with my own friends, it was easy to read and funny most of the time. You could clearly read the bond between them, which is a sign of great writing by Brock.
The story gets dark at points, which gives the book a good contrast to the comedic banter. I really enjoyed reading this book. I hope there’s a second one. I’m giving it a 4 out of 5 stars for the clever banter and conspiracy theory that the Vatican runs the world and will stop at nothing to protect itself.
Pages: 280 | ASIN: B06XQ4ZB83
Treasure on the Southern Moor
Treasure on the Southern Moor is set in the eighteenth century, during the golden age of sail, and shows how gentlemen sailed the raging seas. Written by Joshua A. Reynolds, this historical fiction novel takes the faithful crew from Plymouth, to West Africa, and back to Plymouth, with only the guidance of an old map that was given to the captain by an old sea friend.
Back Description: The thrill of the sea – the song of the ocean winds – out sails and up anchor! – guided by the compass and stars – as a poet once said, “to the lonely sea and sky”. It is the eighteenth century, and the sailing vessel is the only way to travel the raging seas. The Southern Moor sets sails from England to Africa with a crew of forty-two persons, guided by a captain with his son and daughter, where those of the trusted crew hope to find treasure with only the guidance of a map an old friend of the captain’s had given him and a handful of the treasure itself, brought back from the African shoreline. With the smell of cooking from the galley, you may find them about on the weather decks reefing the sails or lashing down the ship’s boats, or listen to the captain play on his fipple flute with the accompaniment of the cello and violin. Hear the ocean waves lap against the bows, or have cataracts of sea water come flooding over the main deck in the midst of a raging storm.
In Plymouth, England, there are those few friends of the captain who wonder if he will ever return. Is the Southern Moor, newly finished vessel and never before tested in the ocean waters, strong enough to sail through storms and cannon fire to reach the warm lands of the African shoreline and make the same journey back? With all of its rectangular sails billowing in the wind, bowsprit brass tip of heather shining in the sunlight, and the polish of the wood shining without a fingerprint to be seen, the Southern Moor leaves the harbor of Sutton Pool to test itself in the ocean and plough the stormy seas. . .
Treasure on the Southern Moor is expected to be in print within two weeks’ time! Check out his website for purchases and updates.
Recommended for family reading. They were specially written for children but have something that all ages can enjoy.
Joshua A. Reynolds
Joshua A. Reynolds writes to restore Christian virtues and family values back into society. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and holds to the reformed faith of Christendom. Russell Kirk’s conservatism most closely aligns with his political views, and his desire is to redeem the innocence of the “permanent things” in literature. One of his main goals in storytelling is to allow the reader to understand better theology, history, and more wholesome ways of living in a simple imaginative way. Some of the authors that have inspired his imagination are C. S. Lewis, Edith Nesbit, Frances Burnett, Mary Dodge, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and Lewis Carroll.
To find out more about Joshua A. Reynolds, please visit his website at www.conservativecornerstones.wordpress.com.
The Williams House
The Williams House is a story about eight children who live in a large country house and have all sorts of adventures through the timespan of one year. It is authored by Joshua A. Reynolds and designed to show the great imaginative world of simple, wholesome living. It is a family story meant to be read to children or enjoyed by adults and children alike.
Back Description: This is a story about eight children whose names are Lilly, Ann, Will, Johnathon, Timothy, Margaret, Susan, and Maria. They live in a very large and mysterious house where they have all sorts of adventures. It is a stone house on an old country lane, and it is not only the place where they explore, imagine, tell stories, sing, and play musical instruments, but it is also the place where they do school and study, and so you see, between the work and play, they became very familiar with the house indeed. Yet it never ceases to surprise them, how it can look in the moonlight, or on a rainy day, or with morning beams of sunlight flowing through its windows. Join them in the attic for a story on a stormy night, or find them in a park on a summer afternoon with the warm wind in their faces, or see them bent over candles as they look at old rooms and dusty shelves.
Friends of theirs are the Bentley family, who are allowed a peek into many of their family adventures. Find them all listening to birds sing while they look for buried treasure, or listening to bassets howl on an autumn night. Though there is a sad moment between them, it is also strangely filled with joy and contentment, as those who are filled with light cannot be anything else.
Perhaps the most exciting moment of all is when the Williams’ children find something on the basement landing of their home. The basement is not a place they are allowed to go to often, and the children have called it the cellar among their whispered stories, yet the discovery makes the cellar stairs a more easily traveled lane…
Recommended for family reading. They were specially written for children but have something that all ages can enjoy.
Joshua A. Reynolds
Joshua A. Reynolds writes to restore Christian virtues and family values back into society. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and holds to the reformed faith of Christendom. Russell Kirk’s conservatism most closely aligns with his political views, and his desire is to redeem the innocence of the “permanent things” in literature. One of his main goals in storytelling is to allow the reader to understand better theology, history, and more wholesome ways of living in a simple imaginative way. Some of the authors that have inspired his imagination are C. S. Lewis, Edith Nesbit, Frances Burnett, Mary Dodge, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and Lewis Carroll.
To find out more about Joshua A. Reynolds, please visit his website at www.conservativecornerstones.wordpress.com.
The Hazards of Adolescence
Robert Joe Stout Author Interview
Miss Sally is a portrait of a young girl growing up in Texas in the 1930’s. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Primarily because I was living in Texas when I wrote it and my three daughters, though not yet in their teens, faced the hazards of adolescence, the coming of age which always is difficult and which Sally Halm, the protagonist of his novel, confronted in exaggerated form. I spent my boyhood in a small predominantly Protestant rural community and felt it important to portray what rural life was like for a contemporary audience.
The 1930’s are one of my favorite eras because of how much was going on across the country. Why did you choose this as the time period for your story?
My parents were severely affected by the “Great Depression”: they lost everything and had to start life anew in very changed circumstances. Texas was one of the states most affected by migration and the social changes that the Great Depression triggered. Mere survival became the primary preoccupation of millions of people. These are basic ingredients for the making of a novel.
Sally is a simple minded girl, she is not beautiful, and her family treats her this way. How did you set about capturing the thoughts and emotions of a young girl in the 1930’s?
I had a clear impression of Sally, who she was and what she was like, before I began and in the process of writing became Sally, at least to the extent of feeling what she felt, seeing the world as she experienced it, incorporating my own background of growing up in a socially restricted rural community where failed crops and tent revivals were a reality.
What is the next book that you are writing and when will it be available?
I’ve just completed a novella about how an incapacitating illness affects a marriage. It’s being considered by several editors. Also in the hands of editors is a recently compiled book of published short stories about Mexico. This fall I’m issuing as an ebook a nonfiction account of government repression of a teachers’ movement in Oaxaca, Mexico, which includes firsthand reporting. It’s to be called Kill the Teachers! And I’m beginning work on a freewheeling journalistic appraisal of the confused political and economic shenanigans involving the United States and Mexico.
Author Links: GoodReads | Twitter | Facebook | Website
This is the story of a young girl’s painful initiation into womanhood: the discovery of sex without hope of love, and grief without the release of tears. The setting is rural Texas in the 1930s, a rough and tumble environment in which the thirteen-year-old Sally Halm questions but tries to appease her authoritarian mother’s religiosity, appeasement that leads to misguided attempts to seek a salvation that her environment ruptures
Sally’s father has distanced himself not only from his wife but Sally and her two older brothers and two older sisters. The mother’s ally is the son who hopes to become an evangelical minister; the rebel is Sally’s oldest sister, who Sally and the middle sister Hill’ry discover in a lovemaking tryst with a neighbor boy. Hill’ry is the family’s child protégé who is given privileges that Sally is denied and who Sally both envies and admires, attributes which tumble her into misadventures than Hill’ry sidesteps.
As Sally struggles to reconcile the concepts of “sin” and “salvation” that seem to dominate her life she ricochets between hope and rejection. Inspired by the testimony of a woman evangelist who recounted rising from degradation to achieve happiness and prosperity thanks to accepting Jesus as her personal savior Sally tries to emulate her but realizes “everything I do I do backwards, I can’t even sin without people laughing at me.”
Sent to live with relatives in another part of central Texas, Sally becomes infatuated with an older cousin whom she helps to milk and to breed a mare. Though supportive he’s a man who seems to hate himself, a hard drinker who has no use for religion and prefers the company of prostitutes than that of “churchy people.” Again Sally does things backwards and alienates him as she’s alienated others. Her decision to run away from family, from the she’s leading and has led, thrusts her into even greater entanglements, entanglements that make her realize how difficult it is to have one’s immortal soul saved, even when that’s all that one has left.
A reviewer cautioned, “You’ll love Miss Sally, but she’ll break your heart.”
Infidelity
There is no greater test of love than that which Chadwick and JaLana faced 11 years into their marriage. JaLana thought her marriage and life would be like any other couple attempting to live a life of faith in God. While they had met their fair share of troubles and setbacks in life, they were always united together. All of that was suddenly wiped away the morning JaLana saw her husband exiting the garage with another woman that had been living with them. The next day, Chadwick came forth about the affair he had been having for the past six months with the sister of a friend they both had allowed in their home. Stunned and shocked, JaLana had a choice to make. Her husband had made it clear that he didn’t want to be in a relationship with her anymore. He wanted a divorce.
Twelve years later, the couple remains together. How did they do it? Why didn’t JaLana give up and give her husband the divorce he wanted? Learn how the love of Christ was able to touch both JaLana and her husband Chadwick Walsh. Discover how God’s truth came into the marriage, moving them both to humility enough to feel the burning love He had, and will always have for each and every one of His children.
Chadwick and his wife have now teamed together to retell the story of one of the most vulnerable moments they have shared as a couple. They explain the steps they took to regain their marriage completely without any remaining residue. They have laid everything bare to bring the world their personal experience of adultery and how God led them through the fire to a marriage completely healed.
In a completely new take on a book about adultery, you will read from both perspectives of husband and wife, how adultery had broken them both. They discuss the common pitfalls man and wife can face on the road to recovery and offer practical guidance for grieving couples who might know the same pain they have faced.
JACS
J A C S
A BOOK OF SHORT STORIES
GEORGE J. MARDO
JACS places people in hard or surprising situations and challenges the reader to accept when the characters do not follow a traditional arc. George Mardo writes in such a way that seeks to subvert the easy plot points and story lines most readers have been familiar with in most recent years. Typical of a short story collection JACS contains a variety of stories.
The first story, Jackpot, follows two older men who have a racehorse bestowed on them. The catch is that the horse has never entered a race and both men play the part but are surprised to find themselves happy when things do not go their way. The next is, Amy, where the reader follows a girl who has strange dreams and holds onto them. The story really gets underway when she tells her grandfather about them and he confesses to having the same dreams. Candera is a hard story to read, since it follows a nun that was sent to the Congo and her tribulations of being captured by terrorists, raped, and becoming pregnant. When forced to try, and send the child away to be adopted, Sister Candera refuses. The last, Sorrow Has No Opposite, is more of a short, fictional biography that follows a Iraqi boy named Boutros Suffady, who undergoes a horrific tragedy and eventually finds happiness in life that he thought he lost.
Mardo has a talent for needling into a character’s perspective and teasing out what emotional heart strings should be pulled for the reader. These stories on their face may sound overwrought or framed in such a way to be emotionally manipulative, as it would be usually expected but Mardo avoids this with clear heartfelt authenticity. If nothing else, the author captures the “slices of life” that some may take particular pleasure in.
Some of the stories tend to be stronger than others and that will depend on the reader who wishes to give this collection a chance. The stories would be considered more literary based on the more character focused stories and lack of any real genre conventions. These small narratives are not adrenaline bouncing thrillers, nor are they dark and mysterious mysteries or horrors. What these stories do capture is the grounded reality that all of us abide in and these experiences all these characters’ share are to enlarge our scope.
JACS is recommended to more mature readers who are seeking different experiences on the page. The stories provide a unique lens that the reader only dons for a short time but will be left wondering long after reaching the end.
All Are My Children
Ernesto Lozada Uzuriaga Author Interview
What I really liked about The Contemporary Christian Colouring Book is that each image evokes the idea of a stained-glass window one might see inside a church. How did you decide which images made it into the book?
It was a very eclectic criteria. I was looking for balance, rhythm too, it has to flow from one page to the other. There was some logic in the arrangement but also it was very intuitive.
Why did you think it was important to create this book for contemporary Christians?
Christians need to re-think and re-imagine their faith in an evolving and fast changing culture. The purpose of these images is to challenge us to ask questions and reflect ‘what does it mean?’
My favorite image was Jesus and the 99%. Do you have a favorite image in the collection?
I couldn’t say…all are my children
I like colouring because it’s relaxing. Why do you think adult colouring books are so popular today?
Because it give you a pause. Life is so hectic that we need as never before pauses in our life.
Author Links: Website
LITERARY TITAN 