IN THE PROCESS OF PUBLICATION ...

BACK COVER TEXT:

Philosophy and theology have increasingly turned to the problem of the rising numbers of people who live in extremely severe and abasing conditions of oppression, people who are surplus to global economic and political orders which the oppressed define as "neoliberal" and "neocolonial." This work, Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance, is part of that turning, through conversations with those who were and have been living under oppressive conditions, especially in Central America and Mexico, and through conversations with phenomenology, feminist theology, feminist jurisprudence, ethics, and liberation theology.

There is an assertion that divine grace, and the autochthonous organization of the "lifeworld" which phenomenologists discuss, act in concert to seek to enable and empower the flourishing of all things, including humans, who have the reflective capacity to understand, conceptualize, imagine, produce and judge. The actions of grace and the autochthonous are in a sense the same as they move to privilege places and spaces where flourishing is impeded, to help mediate opportunities for flourishing. What frequently occurs when people living under oppressive conditions seek to become aware of, or change their circumstances is a backlash by those who control political and economic conditions. This backlash results in resistance. Grace, thus, is the gift of resistance, political, social and economic...

WAS SHE A "SUBJECT" OR AN "OBJECT"?.

"Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?"

-- Toni Morrison, "Beloved"

THE ENDURING

Completed what I now think is the final draft for my short story "The Enduring" - an excerpt is below - since revised a little in the latest version.

I'm not sure what to do with it at this point. Probably let it sit a bit. Exploring publication options. Though I've published nonfiction, this would be the first for fiction - a leap, for sure.

SCATTERED...

I read, write, create, envision in scattered ways, wrong side up, pacing through tunnels and over bridges that lead to unknown destinies, negotiating slippery rocks in a stream that seems to be rushing by too fast, so fast that I know I should have worn a life-jacket, following a character or an assemblage, asking: "What is it you're conjuring now? If we fall, will it be fatal?"

RANDOM REFLECTION ....

It's going to take awhile in this new fiction writing effort until I feel I've gotten a sense of rhythm, pace and phrasing. If I get there at all. Some of it now seems so clumsy ....

DRAFT PASSAGE FROM "THE ENDURING" - A Short Story

Draft excerpt from my short-story "The Enduring" ...

With winter nearing, Elijah occupied himself with the woodpile, often supplied by Malcolm, easily handling the maul, sing-songing a string of thoughts while splitting logs.

“Chop, chop, the chopping block. Mock me, sucker, I’ll knock your clock. No way, no way, you’ll get away. Chop, chop, the chopping block.”

He’d also unchain the dogs and daily walk with them in the woods, feeling like he set them free, himself free, feeling connected to something along the trails and long-abandoned logging roads that would settle him.

“Free, free, run for the sun. Dogs are gunning it on the hunt. This way, that way, anyway now. Free, free run for the sun.”

#

It wasn't entirely unexpected, a day in that looming winter that etched itself in Malcolm's mind as another defining moment in his life. It had a particular eerie vibration that chilled him, that he could feel sweeping across an ancient upcropping of tree-covered bluestone shale like a wild spirit in the wind. Still it seemed sudden, the sisters sensing it too, electric. They looked up at the sky, low dark gray clouds moving much more swiftly than the gray masses above them. Heralds of foreboding.

Both the sisters and Malcolm heard the vehicle coming up Claw Valley Pike, the tires in the loose gravel and dirt, coming from the direction of the Pennsylvania border. ...

PERSONA, PLOT, PROTAGONISTS

Intrigued by the development of a relationship between two persons into a persona-as-protagonist plus the use of two protagonists on parallel plot tracks - such as in Jussi Adler-Olsen's "The Keeper of Lost Causes."

Or, somewhat similarly, the use of two protagonists and their parallel plot lines in Stieg Larsson's "Girl With a Dragon Tattoo."