For those of you who enjoyed David R. Stokes first book The Shooting Salvationist, you’ll want to check out Firebrand as well. Back before the trial of J. Frank Norris for murder there’s another story about arson, perjury, and politics that reveals more of the man that so many fundamentalist leaders have idolize and immitated.
Best of all the book is free for Kindle Download for the next few days. Get it.
First.
I’ve downloaded it. It looks like a quick read. I got the other one, but it awaits getting through a lot of other reading I must do.
It’s sort of no fun to be first if no one else wants it. Can I at least get a sympathy cushion?
Would you like some cheese with that whine?
Yes, please. 😀
I have a slice of American.
J: you were just too good at it. The competition was left behind in the dust.
Congratulations! (2nd)
At first I thought that said “idolized and immolated.” Now that would be a sight…
I’m the first to be next!
We’ve whitewashed the past, imagined it quaint and God-fearing, innocent as a Rockwell painting, when in reality it was as full of human flaws as today’s world. Is it pride or foolishness that makes us think that our own days are worse than other days and that if we could only return to 1912 or 1950 or 1880, we would find a paradise of kindly shopkeepers and gentle farmers?
That’s why it’s always enlightening to read books like this, that hold up a mirror to the world that really was and not the world that some people would like to pretend once was.
I get your point, but I think just reading generally ought to clear up the foolishness you identify. There have never been “the good old days.” The insularity of fundamentalism keeps its adherents from realizing it.
“Everything was much better back in the good old days, when everything was a lot worse”
I’d argue that the foolishness of glowing golden ages is far more widespread than just fundamentalism.
I agree, but there seem to be a lot of people who don’t read. In my own experience, many fundy folks I know only read Christian fiction (think Janette Oke) and sermons and truly DON’T have the balanced view that reading would provide them. And if they read the newspaper and current magazines, that only reinforces the idea that today’s world is a moral sewer compared to what it was in the past.
Maybe we need a challenge: books to get fundies to read which may unfundy them.
By the way, the autocorrect function on my Kindle wants to correct “fundies” to “gunfire.”
Gunfire = fundies? That’s probably pretty appropriate. 😯
I’ve been reading a book about the American West in the 1800s. Religious people then thought they were living in the Last Days, on the grounds that people, and society, couldn’t possibly get any more wicked.
Thanks. I’m about halfway through Stokes’ Apparent Danger. It is a well written interesting account, and I look forward to the new book, although it will have to wait until I finish a couple of the four books I am reading right now.
Thanks, Darrell! _The Shooting Salvationist_ was a fascinating read. I’ve downloaded this one, and will make time to read it really soon. It was just about this time period that my grandmother in Georgia became a fundamentalist–though they didn’t call themselves that, then–and I wish now that I had known enough to ask her what influenced her religious choices.
Awesome! Thanks for the info. Can’t wait to dive more into the sordid life of an original mannagawd!