We had a great time at the festival, with lots of people wandering by-some new to the story but some having already examined the book. I published a summary of the discussions people wanted to talk about at our booth here for the more philosophical minded reader.
Be sure to clap if you enjoy it!
Heres some pictures from the fair:
We had a common goal with a booth nearby!
Chris, narrator for Rekindled, gets ready to spend the day at the fair.
Chris talks about the audio book with a passerby.
Teresa signs books custom for each customer.
A cyclist explores the booth.
Getting set for second day.
What goes up must come back down-Russ carefully dissassembles.
Christopher Lee Lopez brings Rekindled to life, and names like Puttaquappuinckquame roll off his tongue in a way they do not for many of us.
Puttaquappuinckquame is a real name, not a fictional named invented by the author, though it’s spelling in English was surely invented by Roger Williams. Roger Williams studied languages and wrote the first Narragansett dictionary, though there is little guide to pronunciation there. John Elliot gave more guidance.
In the 16th century it seems spelling was a creative skill. Roger Williams does not himself spell words the same in different years. However, none of that will matter as you listen to Christopher Lee Lopez tell the story!
Check your favorite distributor of audiobooks to find Rekindled, and be sure to leave a review! Here are a couple of example places to find it:
If you are new to the audiobook world, you can sign up at either of these sites for a free 30-day trial and download Rekindled for free.
This site allows you to support your favorite participating independent bookstore. It is currently set to Changing Hands, the same store that also carries the CD Audio based version of Rekindled.
For those in the area, drop by the We are all Overcomers booth at the LA Times Festival of Books, booth number 967. Visit author Teresa Irizarry and the narrator of the upcoming Audio Book for Rekindled, Christopher Lee Lopez. Be one of the first to get the limited availability CD based version of the audiobook, whose debut is at this festival, in all the fullness of uncompressed .wav files.
Rekindled is the historical novel that tells the story of Roger Williams in today’s language yet in the context of his time.
We look forward to hearing what you think!
Rekindled, a historical novel about Roger Williams early life, has a starred review from the Pacific Book Review! Have you left a review, for example on Amazon or Goodreads? Reviews by readers help other readers find the book. Thanks for your reviews!
The Rekindled e-book was temporarily unavailable on Amazon while AuthorHouse transitioned data platforms. AuthorHouse has now completed the process of making the book available again, and I apologize for any inconvenience. The e-book remained available from other sources during that interval, such as:
As of 2/23/18 the ebook is again available on Amazon here. There is a new ASIN number.
Books get divided into fiction and non-fiction early in the classification. History books classed non-fiction often have a lot of footnotes, and yet much of what they say connects dots in a way that is more estimation than fact. Sometimes they are shown to be dead wrong but subsequent discovery, yet they don’t get reclassified.
Authors of fiction declare up front there is created story involved. The setting can be historical, and fiction may fill in blanks with stories that might have true, or could have been true. While there is no obligation to stick to history, some writers do — or at least they tell where they have departed from it.
Some story, like Rekindled, is conjecture, a hypothesis set out of what may have been or will be true. Such stories fit neatly into neither fiction or non-fiction. The skeleton is non-fiction and the story fills out the skeleton. Conjectured stories, like software, want to be fixed over time if discoveries are made or facts verified and reinforced.The library system doesn’t have a good place for conjecture. Most business cases are conjecture looking for investment, and if the product is built we find out if they were nonfiction or fantasy. Books have no such process. Why not?
Ancient people seem to have had a process. For example, the assertions from prophets claiming to speak for God were monitored, and if the teachings did not verify the prophet was run out of town, but if the assertions verified, the prophet’s writing grew treasured as revealed scripture. Unfortunately the prophets carrying revelation were also run out of town just because the message was unpopular. That made prophet’s lives fairly miserable (Jeremiah writes as if he nearly suicidal at times) even when they will be remembered well centuries later. Worse, if the message isn’t what the authorities expected, it is supressed.
The story of Christmas is such a story. The person of Jesus, a historically verifiable baby born in time, would give up everything he had on earth to tell us truths about life eternal. Pay attention. Don’t shut out the messenger.
Originally published at Medium.com in About Rekindled
https://youtu.be/BvGFHoz8SP8?t=8m29s
Christopher Lee Lopez discusses Rekindled on the WeHo Sports show.
Correction: Charles Rajnai is mastering the audio of the Rekindled audiobook as an independent contractor. He does not work for or otherwise represent Sony. You can find Charlie at charlesrajnai@gmail.com.
Things happen that make us sad. No one escapes, and it is not often voluntary. The culture of this decade tells us ever more forcefully we should quickly do things to make ourselves happy again. But sadness is not a problem to be solved, it is an emotion to experience. We seem to fear that giving way to sadness will create depression, but the opposite may be more true. There is a season for sadness. For many, that will be poignant and piercing during a holiday season as memories of lost loved ones surface.
So, if we must go to this place of sadness, and if getting back to happiness immediately is not the optimal goal, how do we do sadness well? The book of Numbers is an amazing teacher in the lessons of how to do sadness well. We are given both positive and negative role models, beautifully explained in Paul M. Alexander’s audio exposition of Numbers. Here are six rules for doing sadness:
1. Lament.
Lament means to passionately feel or express sorrow or regret. When we lament, we say how we really feel. We don’t cover it up and paper it over. If there are no humans close to you willing to listen, find the places in community where there is help. For loss of a loved one, an example place is GriefShare. God is always willing to listen.
2. Do not complain.
When we complain we demand different circumstances. We lean in to a spirit of “I deserve better” or “we could have had”. We often remember the past in a distorted way, all positive or exaggerated negative. I am uncomfortable with Mary Lee Settle’s rendition of Roger Williams when she has him say things like “If only I could have saved the books.” Roger Williams laments often, but always retains hope for future enlightenment of his fellows, and does not in his own writing ever engage in “what ifs” or “if only”. He is fundamentally submitted to God’s plan, and focused on the knowledge that God’s glory is the end in mind.
3. Ask.
We can ask for a better future. Don’t demand a better future here on earth, as if it is for sure what God would want. Do request God’s mercy and His strength. Trust Him to know what is best.
4. Reflect.
Sadness precedes an opportunity to recreate. The historian Andrew K. Frank noted in his history of Miami that rampant destruction always preceded new construction. Loss causes sadness, but our beings are created to recover. We are given access to more our brain capacity while we are sad to enable a recovery. There is beauty in a minor key.
5. Lift your eyes.
Sadness is local. It is caused by our loss. There is another perspective, not self-centered but broader. The sunset and sunrise are still given every day. Others are in need and we can help them. It is when the Israelites stop bemoaning their plight in the desert and begin to obey toward larger community objectives that they rise above their sadness to experience God’s joy.
6. Integrate.
Some sadness will always be with us, but we can make it a component of our lives, not our whole life. It is an emotion, eventually not the only or dominant emotion. We have rites of remembrance to commemorate what we have been through, rites that give us a healthy periodic return. Then we move forward.
Doing sadness well can help us do three things:
- Stay in God’s best plan while we are sad.
- Emerge stronger than we entered.
- Gain insights we would not otherwise have. It is even possible to know joy while sad, and it is possible to be happy again after a season of sad.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled.
The image is by RachJose courtesy of morgue file.com.
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Tiffany Sun documented her way of determining worth here, and her thesis is that she wants a metric that measures how much people create vs. consume every day. Yet, even granting how much is created vs. consumed could be a laudable metric compared to the average person’s way of assessing worth, consider:
- the greatest ideas do not always or even often come from pushing projects every day. They come while washing the car…or otherwise relaxing focus and standing back from the data, and letting the brain mush it about somewhere conscious controls can’t reach. Not all people’s creations are equally creative!
- Every day? People who hustle every day may or may not create anything. Luther had one objection to the powers that be 500 years ago and it was the selling of indulgences. He hustled and created the 95 thesis so famously nailed to the door of the church. In the end with deep thought he derived all the issues back to one concept: scripture is the only final authority we have. And that was enough to impact millions of people for hundreds of years. The church must reform by better interpreting scripture. I could have as easily picked a technology example. The point is that worthwhile inventions don’t come every day. They happen, and then may require more thought than hustle to refine.
However, another point of view of what constitutes a thing worth spending time or treasure on worth is here, starting at about minute 35. From this perspective, what you give worth to in life will be creation, or the creator. To find what the creator values, look to his revelation.
The creator says we are each made in the image of God. In that sense each of is priceless. Every single one has the promise of making a unique and valuable contribution to the Kingdom. Every single one. We just have to turn to follow the creator.
Image by Cohdra courtesy of morguefile.com.
Originally published on Medium.com in About Rekindled
Worth Part 3 is available on Medium exclusively, here. If you enjoy this series, login to Medium and clap for it (up to 50 claps allowed per reader!) In this way you will help others find the series, and Medium says I may eventually get paid! A limited number of Medium articles are available per month, so I’m interested in feedback in how that is working for readers that follow this blog.
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After Roger Williams founded Providence, John Winthrop wrote him a letter. John was still in Boston, staging a comeback from a failed election. Roger was banished from John’s town, and John while a friend had been one of the participants in getting Roger banished. By the time of the letter, most had given up on Roger ever recanting. John Winthrop had been help by Roger’s relationships with the natives local to Providence, and John was exploring potential ways to reward Roger.
He asked Roger six questions, one of which could be rephrased, the first of which was “What have you gained?” In other words, was it worth it? These two men come from similar background, both of modest means but backed by a wealthy mentor. His query betrays either sarcasm or curiosity — perhaps both. What was it that Roger Williams valued so highly that he could spurn the church fathers, that made him willing to live in the mud hole of outcasts that John had elsewhere called the sewer of New England?
One thing. It was only one thing. Roger William’s was convinced his mission was from the Lord. He counted his relationship with the Lord higher than any relationship with man. His conviction to separate church and state would purify the church, freeing it to grow in conformance to scripture, but not in the timeframe of his own life on earth.
He wasn’t a victim. On the contrary he ran when they were after him, and avoided the gallows and the Towers. He was shrewd in retaining his liberty. But he wasn’t about to give up on his convictions or his liberty. You can see the full response to Winthrop’s questions, quoted in full with minimal language modernization, at the end of chapter 30 in Rekindled.
Of all the differences in characterization of Roger Williams over the years, this is the also the one thing that has been misportrayed. The grandson of two of the men that fought him was Cotton Mather, and Cotton Mather had a vested interest in assuring Roger Williams reputation remained poor among the faithful. Cotton Mather did not take Roger Williams at face value but twisted his views and portrayed them as Godless. That is how Roger Williams came to seem secular to the modern mind. If all you read is the one sentence soundbites lurking about Rhode Island to this day you could have believe John Barry’s and prior biographers version of Roger Williams.
That view falls apart quickly if you read Roger Williams’s own writing. His rationales are based in scripture, scripture that appears to be memorized and slung like a sling shot. Writings in the 17th century, especially of those not wealthy enough to have editors, can be circular, repetitive, difficult for the modern mind to read. It is no wonder most stick to the sound bites. To unravel the knot of argument between Cotton and Williams takes time and care. And yet, Cotton, Williams, Vane and Winthrop all have writings available today. In fact, they are more accessible than at any intervening time period given digitization and modern scholarship. While Rekindled is not derivative of intervening years’ historians’ views, the story is directly consistent with original period writings.
A late-in-life letter was deciphered a few years back that confirms the late Roger Williams held the beliefs of the early Roger Williams. His early writings were not just the passion of youth, discarded with age. In fact the opposite. His disillusion with earthly institutions left his yearning for the Kingdom whole.
Originally published on Medium in About Rekindled.
The image is Roger William’s cipher decoded as “Desire for Liberty”
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A careful reading of Job confirms: Job’s questions of God, about why his heart is broken and why he must hurt so much and so long, are never straight-on answered. It is a dull thud in a moving book.
Have you ever avoided an outright answer to a child? Wiggled around fully explaining why because they have not the context or experience yet to comprehend? Is that what God does?
We do ask why. In day-to-day reality there is often ample reward for seeking the why. But we are not rewarded with satisfying answers when disaster happens to us or ours. We may find a pre-disaster sequence of injustices or carelessnesses, or we may not know. We can even talk about the consequence of original sin, but it does not satisfy.
Umberto Eco’s character pseudo Saint-Savin asks, “How can you call merciful a divinity that desires our eternal unhappiness only to appease his rage of an instant? We must forgive our neighbor, and he need not?” Sometimes, we each feel like that, even though we can count errors in Saint-Savin’s thinking:
- God does not desire our eternal unhappiness, though he allows the free will to cause it for ourselves.
- God’s wrath is not rage. His anger is controlled, and his consequences just.
- God’s “instant” is not temporary. Each moment of time is eternity from God’s point of view.
- God does forgive as He asks of us, and it was painful to Him. He sent a part of himself, Jesus, to suffer and die to pay for the just consequences and enable forgiveness.
- God is bigger than Saint-Savin can imagine, bigger even than the millions of galaxies that Hubble can now show that Eco and therefore Saint-Savin did not know.
- We all and Umberto Eco’s Saint-Savin are a small piece of a very large plan, unable to see the whole picture. We are asked to trust that it will all be worth it in the end.
For the awful, there is no why that satisfies us; we want evil undone. Once it happens, there is no use pretending the world is or could with our own effort be made all good. There will be no satisfying why. Don’t wait up torturing yourself as if you just haven’t found it yet. And yet, there is no need to put on blinders of denial. With eyes wide open, we are asked to trust, we are asked to accept our very smallness. Let the “why?” go to move on, and to cling to the one who does understand, God, in order to find that new life after.
Originally published on Medium in We are all Overcomers.
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