Wake of Echoes

Stealing Liberty on Amazon STEALING LIBERTY  comes out today and I am SO excited! I hope you buy it, read it, love it, review it and tell all your friends so they can buy it, read it, love it and tell all their friends too. But even if you don't, I want to tell you the story of how it was almost never published. Last year, after my literary agent, Cyle Young of Hartline Literary, had contacted all the big name publishers, inviting them to offer us a contract for Stealing Liberty , he heard back from very few. That's not at all unusual. But the ones who did respond declined to publish it. They liked the concept and the writing , they indicated, but the story was "too Christian." "Too Christian?" I asked. "Really?" Cyle was baffled too. Two things confused us most: First: a couple of these publishers have a long history of publishing  Christian  fiction.  Second:  STEALING LIBERTY  isn't even really a Christian ...

SLAVERY & NAZIS In 1787, Constitutional Convention delegates came to a " Three-Fifths " compromise when deciding how many representatives each state should be allowed in the U.S. House of Representatives. Southern states wanted to count their slaves. Northern states didn't think they should. Thus the three-fifths rule that said each slave could be counted as three-fifths of a human being . Seventy years later, in 1857, a slave named Dred Scott petitioned to buy his freedom because his owners had moved from a slavery state to a free state. In what is largely seen as the most horrendous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the court said that residing in a free state did not entitle Scott to his freedom and that, furthermore, African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States .  Roughly seventy years after that, Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany, espousing the idea that some races are inferior to others, including blacks and Je...

"Every single year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns—30,000." -- President Obama President Obama said that during a speech he gave on January 5, 2016 , when he announced a new executive order to tighten gun control. I have no doubt he believed what he said -- that he believed in what he was doing. First, because Obama's personality has always been unequivocal. During his eight years in office, I never saw him waffle on what he believed. One of Obama's defining characteristics was his fondness for standing ankle-deep in the hardened cement of his progressive ideas while demanding that others "compromise" by coming around to his way of thinking. Second, because Obama shed tears while he made  his speech , and as much as I disagreed with him on ... well, almost everything, I  DO  believe he was sincerely moved by the issue of gun violence in America -- or at least his own righteous indignation in it. I really don't fault him...