This book is a collection of short stories depicting spiritual struggles of a variety of motley characters. Some characters find relief in Christ, while other characters totter on precipices with great hope, enduring colossal ordeal, and yet others plod along with scant or even negative expectations. In some stories, gothic type characters collide with predicaments of their own devious making, while all stories exhibit humans besieged by formidable challenges. For the reader desiring an assortment of varied stories with tangled twists amid religious underlayment, this collection will not disappoint.
Dr. Larry D. Harwood is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA, and occasional Visiting Professor at Tyndale Theological Seminary in Badhoevedorp, Netherlands. In the spring term of 2008, he was an American Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, in the Program in Theory of Literature, Faculty of Letters. Interest in history has prompted interest in the historical novel, and he has in preparation a story of religious migration set in contemporary China and America and entitled The Bicyclists. He is currently finishing a book on Bertrand Russell and religion, Mad About Belief Religion in the Life and Thought of Bertrand Russell, published by Wipf and Stock, while researching for an historical work on Puritan sympathies in British East Anglia in the seventeenth century. Published works include the following books: Tumults in Thinking: A Basic History of Western Philosophy from Pre-Socratics to Postmodernists, Kendall-Hunt Publishers, 2018; Medieval Civilization: Formation, Fruition, Finality and Fall, Wipf and Stock, 2016; Putting Philosophy in its Place: A Preface to the Life of Philosophy, Kendall-Hunt Publishers, 2014; Struggle in a Secular Age: Clashes of Christian Body and Soul, Christian World Imprints, 2013; Denuded Devotion to Christ: The Ascetic Piety of Protestant True Religion in the Reformation, Pickwick Publications, 2012.
2013, I published a collection of seventeen short stories, Ientitled Struggle in a Secular Age: Clashes of Christian Body and Soul, and I was elated and grateful when my editor and publisher, Anshul Kanda, of Christian World Imprints, consented to publish a second volume of new stories in 2020. In the intervening years, I had been adding short stories alongside and for respite from other and different writing projects. I sometimes deem the construction of fictional short stories a welcome relief from the labored writings of my other main interests, history and philosophy. This is of course not to claim because it would be palpably untrue— that fictional writing provides relief because fiction is easier to compose than the tedium involved in philosophical and historical writing.
As stated in my preface to the 2013 collection, I gravitated to fiction after witnessing the power of fiction in the layered hands of the mesmerizing storyteller. However, at times I have felt embarrassment over a tardy and childlike enthusiasm for a form of writing which most people, both inside and outside my profession and circles, appreciated long ago. Most importantly, moreover, and uppermost in my respect for fictional writing, was realization of the stunning conveyance of reality to be found in superb authors of the fictional art form. Those impressions of fiction have remained with me, indeed grown stronger, in the years between these two collections.
Finally, in this volume, like the collection published in 2013, most of the stories have religious or spiritual elements and that without apology. The age we live in (in America as well as other places) is increasingly secular, often aggressively so, and therefore I have offered in these stories some glimpses in the other direction. Shunning of the religious inclination of human nature and the denial of a religious reality as ultimately found in Christ. I believe, are profound and costly mistakes of the secular mind and spirit. Accordingly, they have been depicted as such in this collection.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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