Thanks so much to these bloggers for their thoughtful reviews and for a very cool video
Mel Storm’s Writer Blog http://www.melstorm.com/the-origins-of-faith/ Is History the Agreed Upon Lie? http://ishistorytheagreeduponlie.blogspot.com/2015/06/logos-origins-of-christianity-facts-and.html The Wandering Writer http://ashleecowles.com/2015/06/17/indie-book-review-logos/ My Writer’s Cramp http://mywriterscramp.com/book-review-logos/#comment-5883 A Place in the Spotlight http://4covert2overt.blogspot.ca/2015/06/logos-by-john-neeleman-review-excerpt.html The Barbed Pentacle http://barbedpentacle.com/2015/06/lego-my-logos/# Naimeless http://wp.me/p1gkrF-Ym Smorgasboard Invitation https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/five-star-treatment-logos-by-john-neeleman-recommended-by-m-c-v-egan/ Natural Bri http://www.naturalbri.com/logos/ Laura’s Interests http://dogsmomvisits.blogspot.ca/2015/06/logos-by-john-neeleman-review.html Author Interrupted http://authorinterrupted.com/2015/06/26/author-interrupted-reviews-logos-by-john-neeleman/ Deal Sharing Aunt http://dealsharingaunt.blogspot.ca/2015/06/logos-by-john-neeleman-review-giveaway.html#comment-form Kay’s Blog http://wp.me/p1gkrF-Zq Our Families Adventure http://pirategrl1014.blogspot.com/2015/07/logos.html James[C]Femmer[dot]com http://jamescfemmer.com/2015/07/logos-by-john-neeleman/ Books are Magic http://vidya-booksaremagic.blogspot.ca/2015/07/review-logos-by-john-neeleman.html Alex’s Adventures http://alexwestmore.net/logos-review-a-novel-by-john-neelemen/ Rhonda’s Book Blog http://grannylovestoread.blogspot.ca/2015/07/review-logos-by-john-neeleman.html Read to My Heart’s Content http://www.readtomyhearts.blogspot.ca/2015/07/blog-tour-book-review-logos-by-john.html Emlyn Chand’s Blog & Journal http://wp.me/p1tkO9-2mZ Gathering the Pieces http://ow.ly/PtQT4 Natasha’s Blog thttps://natashasravingreviews.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/logos-a-blog-tour-stop/ Seeking with All Yur Heart http://seekingwithallyurheart.blogspot.ca/2015/07/logos-novel-of-christianitys-origins.html Barbed Penticle: bonus guest post http://barbedpentacle.com/2015/07/logos/# Special thanks to Catalina Egan for a very cool video: http://video214.com/play/uTa1LV7TIe3YcHvPUcQhlg/s/dark...
read more“Go Set a Watchman”, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Novelistic Truth
http://nyti.ms/1fGDiJG I think that in the linked review Professor Kennedy gets Mockingbird/Watchman exactly right. In Mockingbird, Atticus Finch only arguably did the minimum required by the ethical standards of his profession, as he did nothing to challenge the racially biased manner in which the trial was conducted, which led to his client’s conviction. This does not deserve a medal. Apparently in that epoch it took a different quality of courage and character — which Atticus Finch lacked — to oppose institutional racism. To any conscientious lawyer, zealously representing your client ought to be a natural instinct. That is true regardless of the evidence of guilt or innocence — and Atticus was representing a client that through his own investigation he had discovered was innocent. Moreover, it is because of courageous lawyers who challenged institutional racism during the past decades that we have Supreme Court precedent that, for example, prohibits a prosecutor from manipulating the jury selection process to racially stack a jury in the government’s favor. Arguably, Professor Kennedy is judging Atticus from our current more enlightened time and place. Nevertheless, it’s important that we critically consider our nation’s history absent the sentimentality that makes Atticus Finch a hero even to some who live in these more enlightened times. Racism and bigotry is the demon that has belied our purported national identity and ethos of equal rights and equal opportunity, and the process of purging that demon is the most compelling part of our history, I submit. And I submit that while many people yearn for a more sentimental picture of our country’s racist history — the most popular novels written by Americans are probably “Gone with the Wind” and “To Kill a Mockingbird”; I wonder why? — you don’t really get what America is, for better and for worse, unless you get behind that sentimental delusion. This is a type of novelistic truth that great fiction...
read moreAn Interview with John Neeleman at Book Expo America
John Neeleman is interview from the floor of the Javits Center in New York, NY during Book Expo America!
read moreReza Aslan: A Superb Role Model for All Religious
Yesterday I was fortunate to see Reza Aslan speak, for the second time, this time at the Temple De Hirsch Synagogue here in Seattle. Reza Aslan is a Muslim who has written a famous biography of Jesus. I enjoyed the book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and I agree that the historical figure that he portrays is a plausible extrapolation from the considerable facts that we know about first century Palestine. (Zealot was not a source for my novel, Logos, as my book was finished when Zealot was published, but generally I share his interpretation of the historical Jesus.) As Aslan recognizes, while we know a lot about first century Palestine, we know almost nothing about the historical Jesus per se. To quote Harold Bloom, “there was an historical Jesus.” Apparently, like legions of other Jews in the first century, he was murdered by the powers that be because he was rebelling against an unjust society. That is about all we really know about Jesus. Zealot is a famous, bestselling book, but it was Aslan’s formidable oratorical skills and charm that made it so. Shortly after the book was issued, Fox News anchor Lauren Green interviewed Aslan, and her first question was, “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” Standing alone the question itself would have disgraced both Green and Fox. The evident religious partisanship was awful—Aslan’s religious affiliation has nothing to do with his qualifications to write a biography of Jesus. But in response to the question, he adroitly demonstrated the intellectual rigor, integrity, and indeed affection that he had brought in writing his book. The interview went viral, and Zealot, which had been selling “steadily,” became an immediate number one bestseller and an instant popular classic. Yesterday those oratorical gifts were on full display at Temple De Hirsch. My favorite part may have been the personal story that he told about how he became a Muslim. He was born in Iran, to a privileged family: a father who identified himself as an atheist, and a mother who was a lapsed Muslim. In 1979, his father foresaw the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, and its consequences to secular Iranians, and the family fled to the United States and settled in San Francisco. Aslan, viscerally attracted to religion, and wanting to fit in, converted to a conservative protestant branch of Christianity; then he was instrumental in converting his mother to Evangelical Christianity. But in college at Jesuit run Santa Clara University, as he was intensely studying the New Testament and placing it into historical context, his faith began rapidly slipping away (I strongly identified with this part of his story). Here is the part that I love: The Jesuit priests there suggested that Islam may provide him a more satisfying “metaphor” for expressing his faith. He followed their advice and investigated the religion of his ancestors, and converted. Aslan insists that this choice does not represent a belief that Islam is any more “true” than Christianity or any other religion. He says that religion and faith are two different things. He views religion strictly as man-made metaphor; Islam’s metaphor for God simply better expresses his faith than the Christian one does. But he recognizes that this perception on...
read moreSo Which Gospel Does Jacob Write?
Logos dramatizes the composition of the original Gospel – by the novel’s protagonist, Jacob. The novel’s premise is predicated on the consensus among biblical scholars that the canonical Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death, and that all of their authors are anonymous. They likely were not written by persons bearing the names that are attached to them: Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. So, which Gospel does Jacob write? He does not affix any name to it; indeed, he deliberately omits his own. Modern scholarly investigation of the Gospels’ origins – collectively and individually – focuses primarily on what is now commonly known as the “synoptic problem”. The synoptic problem arises from the literary interrelationship among the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke – in the New Testament these three Gospels appear in the foregoing order, and precede John. The synoptic Gospels contain parallel narratives that share similar stories about Jesus’ biography, Jesus’ sayings, and the parables. Moreover, these elements of the common narrative are arranged essentially in the same order, and scholars have shown that the original Greek texts even sometimes used the same words and the same syntax. In contrast, the Gospel of John, while sharing many common characteristics with the synoptic Gospels, differs considerably in organization and language, and its theology is more developed. Matthew contains most of Mark’s substantive content, and Luke substantially less of it. I have seen estimations, for example, that ninety percent of Mark is in Matthew, while Luke includes fifty-five percent of Mark. But biblical scholars can’t even agree on this much. The estimations vary significantly about what the three texts actually have in common and where they diverge. While the three synoptic Gospels overlap substantially, Matthew and Luke each contain an enormous amount of content that is not in Mark. This has led biblical scholars to conclude that Mark is the original canonical Gospel. The gist of the argument is that it’s a lot easier to explain why Matthew’s and Luke’s authors would have added material, than why Mark’s author would have omitted such a large quantity of significant content. However, despite the parallels between Matthew and Luke, mainstream Gospel scholars have concluded that the differences between them are of such significance and magnitude that the anonymous authors of each of these Gospels must have worked independently. Indeed, Matthew contains a great deal of content that is in neither Mark nor Luke. For example, Matthew contains more of Jesus’ sermons. Matthew and Luke differ in their depiction of the early part of Jesus’ life. There are many other important differences between Matthew and Luke of varying degrees. Nevertheless, the numerous striking similarities between Matthew and Luke must be explained: Accordingly, mainstream Gospel scholarship has concluded that there must have been an additional Gospel, now lost, that was a source for Matthew and Luke, which Gospels were composed independent of one another. The mainstream view is that Matthew and Luke relied on Mark, and this additional, hypothetical mystery source. The mystery source is most often identified as Q, a proto-Gospel. Other hypothetical sources or proto-Gospels have been identified as well, e.g., L, M and K. As I say, the existence of Q represents the mainstream view, but there is nevertheless substantial disagreement – and beyond the mere existence of Q, the views diverge...
read more“Logos,” the Advent of the Modern Mind, and the Historical Novelist’s Craft
I think the twentieth century political philosopher Leo Straus put it well when he wrote that the European mind became what it is “through the coming together of biblical faith and Greek thought.” “In order to understand ourselves and to illuminate our trackless way into the future, we must understand Jerusalem and Athens.” “Judeo-Christian” has long seemed to me an imprecise and inadequate, a useless label for whatever it is intended to identify, even largely redundant. “Judeo-Athenian” is to me more descriptive and more meaningful, even today. Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire was the proximate cause of the encounter between Judaism and ancient Greek intellectual achievements. The synthesis of these two metaphysical traditions produced the advent of Christianity. The mechanism by which the synthesis occurred was the Logos. “Logos” has been a continuous thread throughout the development of European culture and the New World cultures that it established and has influenced. Moreover, as Stephen Greenblatt explains in his brilliant non-fiction book “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” it is the Athenian element in European culture that produced the institutions that preserved the Iliad, Lucretius, Cicero, et al. that were so influential to Enlightenment and Renaissance thinkers. The writings of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived in about 500 B.C., is the earliest evidence we have of the word “Logos” receiving special attention. If there were such a thing as a Greek-English dictionary at that time, you might find the word Logos defined to mean: an argument, reasoned discourse, an opinion, word, speech, account, to reason. Among the contemporaries of the historical Jesus and Paul, was a scholar and philosopher in Alexandria named Philo, who lived form 20 BC to 50 AD. Philo was a Hellenized Jew, and his family was among the richest in the Empire. They were tight with the emperor’s family and spent a lot of time in Rome. His brother was a spectacularly wealthy merchant who donated money to gold plate the gates of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Philo’s brother even loaned a substantial sum of money to the Jewish King Herod. Philo’s family were merchants and civic leaders, but he was a famous philosopher who is very famous to this day. Philo lived with one foot in the secular world and one in the religious tradition of his fathers – Judaism – and he set out to synthesize or reconcile those two traditions. For example, Philo expounded about how the stories in the Hebrew scriptures were probably allegorical. But his focal point was the Logos. He toyed with the idea that Logos was God, which he felt was in a sense true. But Philo felt that God defies human comprehension. So he refined the concept, ultimately deciding that Logos meant an intermediary divine being: Logos, Philo decided, is God in contact with human senses or understanding. Philo wrote that intermediary beings are necessary to bridge the enormous gap between God and the material world. These would include angels of the Lord in the scriptures. Philo describes the Logos as the revealer of God symbolized in the Scriptures by an angel of the Lord The Logos was the highest of these intermediary beings, and was called by Philo “the first-born of God” and the eldest and chief of the angels. Philo also described...
read moreWhat is Truth?
A novel’s opening line is important. According to Stephen King, “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” And there is none better than the immortal opening line of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” You may recognize it also as the first sentence of the Gospel of John, John 1:1. I think I understand completely why Eco made the Gospel of John’s opening line that of his own celebrated novel. John 1:1 always gives me a little shiver. I recognize that–I am happy to accept that–this may be for no reason other than its sheer artistry. I can attest that there is plenty of meaning in the Bible for the full range of believers, unbelievers, scriptural literalists, and scriptural skeptics. What this means of course is that the Bible is subject to a multiplicity of subjective interpretations. Is the author of John being ironic? Is the author of John giving us a sly wink? About John 1:1, an unbeliever can say, “Aha! Yes, I agree. God is just that–the word–a literary character; he’s just words created by humans.” But if you write John 1:1 as the original (anonymous) author of the Gospel of John intended–closer to as it was originally written in Greek–or as Goethe wrote it in Faust–“in the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and Logos was God,” the potential meanings multiply still more. As packed with meaning as is our English word “word,” “logos” has even much more. Even to a thoughtful unbeliever, the power of the Christian story, of those mere words – for better or worse, whatever your unbelief–must be undeniable. In his superb New Yorker blog article this week, “In Search of the Great American Bible” (February 9, 2015), Rollo Romig notes: “Only scripture inspires this kind of extreme explication” such that “every letter and number is routinely scrutinized for esoteric messages, using methods ranging from gematria to theomatics to Koranic symmetry to Equidistant Letter Sequences.” My novel Logos has as an epigraph the following quotation, also one of my favorite scriptural passages, and again from John (John 18:37-38): “Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?” Here I certainly picture that, with that last sentence, the author of John is giving us a sly wink. However, mainstream scholars recognize that there was certainly a historical Jesus. Harold Bloom has written: “There was an historical Jesus, but we know virtually nothing about him. The only source we more or less can trust is the Jewish historian Josephus, from whom we glean a few facts: Joshua, the son of Joseph and Miriam, became a disciple of John the Baptist, a charismatic reformer of spirituality. This Joshua (Jeshua in Hebrew, Jesus in Latin[, Yeshua in English]) in turn developed into a charismatic wisdom teacher, followed by a number...
read moreWhat Makes a Good Independent Publisher Special?
Homebound Publications is publishing my debut novel, Logos. Its website describes Homebound as “an award-winning independent publisher.” What is an “independent publisher”? I think this is important, particularly because of the crucial differences between independent publishers and what is colloquially known as “The Big Five” or “legacy” publishing houses. However, the distinction may be more than what meets the eye – or perhaps less, depending upon your knowledge about the publishing industry. According to Wikipedia, “[t]he terms ‘small press’, ‘indie publisher’, and ‘independent press’ are often used interchangeably, with ‘independent press’ defined as publishers that are not part of large conglomerates or multinational corporations.” In an article at CNN.com titled “If it’s cool, creative, and different, it’s indie” (October 13, 2006), journalist Catherine Andrews wrote: “The term ‘indie’ traditionally refers to independent art – music, film, literature or anything that fits under the broad banner of culture – created outside of the mainstream and without corporate financing.” Such presses make up approximately half of the market share of the book publishing industry. However, in my opinion, the foregoing raises more questions than it answers, as I’ll explain. First, bear with me as I identify the three broad categories of book publishing today in the United States, because I think it’s most instructive to compare them with one another: (1) “The Big Five” or “legacy” publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster (the Penguin-Random House merger in mid-2013 turned what was The Big Six into The Big Five); (2) independent presses; and (3) “self-publishing presses,” “subsidy presses,” or “vanity presses”. I’ll address the easiest comparison first, between categories (1) and (2) on the one hand, and (3), on the other: The Big Five and independent or small presses alike generate revenues by selling books to consumers – mostly indirectly, through retailers. Self-publishing or subsidy presses, on the other hand, sell services to authors – the author agrees to pay for the publication of his or her work, or to purchase a minimum purchase of copies. This distinction is made by the objective terms of the bargain made between author and publisher, and is easy to identify and demonstrate. However, the Big Five and the independent publishers operate on the same business model: In general, the author writes the book and the publisher undertakes the classic business risks associated with designing the book and manufacturing it and selling it. The publisher creates the physical manifestation of the book, mass produces the book, drives the marketing process, and distributes the book. The publisher receives the gross revenues from sales of the book, and pays the author a royalty, typically of 10 to 20 percent of gross revenues. This is the arrangement I have with Homebound. Also, at Homebound, the creative and business processes of making Logos a consumer product have involved the same acquisition process, editor, editorial assistant, publisher, and publicist that classically characterize the Big Five’s workings (though particularly at smaller small presses, some individuals may wear more than one hat). Independent presses – like The Big Five – tend to be organized as corporations, and maintain business relationships if not a literal presence internationally. But the similarities between the Big Five and independent presses do not end there, and the differences may be more subjective...
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