A Bright Candle On A Darkling Plain

In 1651 the young King Charles II fights to regain his crown, and leads an army to Worcester, where he suffers a disastrous defeat. In his flight to safety, he is sheltered by a young pregnant widow, whose late husband was the rumored bastard of his grandmother. He vows to protect her and her unborn child when he regains the throne.Upon his Restoration he seeks out his savior, only to find she is dead, leaving behind a daughter named Lisette. Charles takes her as his ward and brings her to Court. Nine-year old Lisette Gordon is uprooted from a God-fearing home to be raised in the bawdy-house known as Whitehall Palace, where she becomes the mistress to both the King and his bastard son Jamie. After rebelling against the amoral ways of the Court, Charles sends her back to her home near Dover, where she finds true love in Angus Gordon. The lovers must struggle to maintain their love through many tribulations, including the continuing obsession of Jamie with Lisette and her addiction to laudanum.

In 1651 the young King Charles II fights to regain his crown, and leads an army to Worcester, where he suffers a disastrous defeat. In his flight to safety, he is sheltered by a young pregnant widow, whose late husband was the rumored bastard of his grandmother. He vows to protect her and her unborn child when he regains the throne. Upon his Restoration he seeks out his savior, only to find she is dead, leaving behind a daughter named Lisette. Charles takes her as his ward and brings her to Court. Nine-year old Lisette Gordon is uprooted from a God-fearing home to be raised in the bawdy-house known as Whitehall Palace, where she becomes the mistress to both the King and his bastard son Jamie. After Lisette rebels against the unjust treatment of mistresses and the amoral court, Charles sends her back to her home near Dover, where she finds true love in Angus Gordon. The lovers must struggle to maintain their love through many tribulations, including the continuing obsession of Jamie with Lisette and Lisette's addiction to laudanum. This is a sweeping novel of the Stuarts, the Gordons, and the Medicis. It is a fictional tale interwoven with well-researched history. It is a saga that goes beyond the Court to Dover, and on into Queen Anne's reign.

Speaking the deepest and truest thoughts of humankind in the language available only to the gifted, the Victorian poets elected to do more than merely sing as versifiers. By coming to grips with thorny contemporary issues and suggesting workable solutions, they struggled to lead their people out of the wilderness. Tennyson, who came to be known as the voice of Victorianism, is the poet most often credited with this ambition. But Matthew Arnold and the other major poets had a similar aim. Their poems, while not devoid of feeling, are charged with the main currents of social, scientific, religious, and philosophical thought. Interwoven and resonating in sensuous song is their own thought. The best of the poetry fits the word and thought to the troubling developments of the time and rises to a prophecy to predict the problems of our time.

Ray Bradbury's story of fireman Guy Montag, professional book burner, tackles the incendiary issue of censorship.

A woman trying to solve the mystery of a drowned PI discovers the truth is dangerous.

Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

For the orthodox Christian who grounds his philosophy of history on the doctrine of creation, the mainspring of history is God. Time rests on the foundation of eternity, on eternal decree of God. Time and history therefore have meaning because they were created in terms of God's perfect and totally comprehensive plan. The humanist faces a meaningless world in which he must strive to create and establish meaning. The Christian accepts a world which is totally meaningful and in which every event moves in terms of God's purpose; he submits to God's meaning and finds his life therein. This is an excellent introduction to Rushdoony. Once the reader sees Rushdoony's emphasis on God's sovereignty over all of time and creation, he will understand his application of this presupposition in various spheres of life and thought.