"Dixie Heretic is a life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy (1900-1985), an impassioned, tortured man who strove ardently to make his white Alabama congregants 'more Christian' by acknowledging their own racism and greed, and who not only lived but chronicled carefully many of the forces culminating in the right-wing conservative movement today. As McWilliams relates, Kennedy came from 'upcountry' South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians. They lived by biblical infallibility and a strain of individual piety and salvation focused on the hereafter. In the early 1920s, however, his ministerial studies took him to Princeton Theological Seminary. There, he encountered the 'Presbyterian Conflict' over science, fundamentalism, and the social gospel, and he emerged a radical Christian socialist. Like a few other articulate practitioners of 'Neo-orthodoxy,' young Kennedy stayed true to the literalist Bible, and the salvation and piety allegiances of his youth. But he embraced not only the Social Gospel's mandate to solve earthly problems of poverty and prejudice but many cardinal tenets of modern science, as well. To Kennedy, this posed no contradiction. In 1927 Kennedy moved to Camden, Alabama, the seat of Wilcox County, where he soon married and started a family. Meanwhile, his ministry for social change dominated his Wilcox pastorates, filled with the very people from whom he derived: the Scotch-Irish. Quietly, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to confront and change the behaviors and beliefs of his congregations, notably their attitudes about race and poverty. And to do this, he found, he had to attack what he considered traditionalist Christian hypocrisy - 'half Christianity,' or non-social gospel Christianity - some of which he came to see as a form of proto-fascism, if not fascism itself. He soon turned to penning confrontational short stories, many published in Christian Century and some in the New Republic and set in his fictitious 'Yaupon County.' In some of these stories he overtly revealed his allegiances as a Social Gospel Christian and as an adamant supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party. He spared no one, not even members of his own congregation. He also abandoned his pacifism and urged US intervention in World War II: he hoped that the defeat of racial fascism abroad might somehow grow white hearts at home. Ultimately, to help eliminate 'the anti-Christ, the mad dog, Hitler,' Kennedy joined the U.S. Army. As a chaplain with the famed 102nd Evacuation Hospital, he experienced some of the most horrific chapters of the conflict - Saint Lo, the Battle of the Bulge - and arrived at Dachau a mere week after German soldiers fled. The postwar world gave Kennedy periods of optimism and hope. He returned from the war believing America might deal with its own racial issues the way it had treated Europe and Japan's. His own children grew into educated, enlightened, and thriving adults. And new developments in his professional life brought considerable increases to his family income, easing his wife's long financial insecurities. Yet these years also offered a great many frustrations. Even by 1948 he knew his Social Gospel hopes about racism, fascism, and white entitlement, especially among his fellow Scotch-Irish, were naïve at best. The rise of the Dixiecrat movement (a key Dixiecrat leader, Alabama State senator J. Miller Bonner, was a member of his own congregation), only deepened his sense of personal defeat. Even so, the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and occasional developments in state and national politics rekindled at least some of his old Neo-orthodox hope and drive. He played a significant role in desegregating Troy State University, for instance, but the gratifications of even small victories proved fleeting, dashed by the assassinations of Dr. King, JFK, and RFK, and the growing numbers of southern white Republicans and Wallaceites. In Kennedy's increasing 'down' times he was privately the self-professed 'Christian and a Democrat' seeing national Republicans as 'sinners' for their growing embrace of white southern racial conservatives. A long-term 'functional alcoholic,' this privately persistent Neo-orthodox Christian never ceased agonizing over the growing 'half-Christianity' around him. Indeed, he died worrying about what it portended for the role of white supremist, proto-fascists in modern America, aware of having made few inroads on God's mandate and what he considered white Christian wrongs in Alabama. While Renwick Kennedy was front-loaded for the failure he indeed found, still - in the values and social norms he pondered and challenged at every stage of his life, and today so badly in need of recommitment - he stands as a 'good' citizen, a non-hypocritical Christian, and an emblem of hope"--

A LIFE OF DECEPTION… Nearly a century ago, Minoru Kurita abandoned his noble name and heritage when he was adopted by Clan Nova Cat, who utilized his purported psychic abilities to create a powerful new breed of warrior: the Mystic Caste, a secretive spiritual branch of the Clan led by their exalted Oathmaster... From the moment Kisho left the Iron Womb, he has been trained in the Mystic Caste with one goal in mind: to forge his entire being into a tool—not simply as a weapon to fight the Clan's enemies, but as an instrument of strength to bring glory to Clan Nova Cat through his visions. Now he has been chosen by the Oathmaster himself to be his protege and possible successor. But Kisho's great pride masks a great deception: He does not believe any of it. He has walked the path all his life, yet he has no faith in the gifts the Mystic Caste supposedly possesses—and he is running out of time… For Kisho is about to be sent into battle with his warrior brethren to fight alongside the forces of the controversial Warlord Katana Tormark—and the faith he has so long denied may be the only thing that can save them...

Examines the religious implications of LSD: the connection between LSD experience and some of the main currents of the New Theology, especially in the ultra-radical Death of God theology.

Shoot: a Loren D. Estleman's Valentino mystery! Valentino, a mild-manner film archivist at UCLA and sometime film detective, is at the closing party for the Red Montana and Dixie Day museum when he is approached by no less than his hero and man-of-the-hour Red Montana, western film and television star. Red tells Valentino that he is being blackmailed over the existence of a blue film that his wife, now known throughout the world as the wholesome Dixie Day and the other half of the Montana/Day power couple, made early in her career. With Dixie on her deathbed, Red is desperate to save her the embarrassment of the promised scandal, and offers Valentino a deal-find the movie, and he can have Red's lost film, Sixgun Sonata, that Red has been hiding away in his archives. Don't accept, and the priceless reel will go up in flames. Feeling blackmailed himself, Valentino agrees and begins to dig. In the surreal world of Hollywood, what is on screen is rarely reality. As he races to uncover the truth before time runs out, his heroes begin their fall from grace. Valentino desperately wants to save Sixgun Sonata...but at what cost? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Born in London in 1879 and raised in the Cape of Good Hope, Beatrice Hastings was one of those talented marginal figures who are major witnesses to their times, but whose testimony has been sadly neglected. After an early marriage and almost immediate widowhood, she had a false start as a showgirl in New York before taking London by storm as the literary editor of, and leading contributor to, the progressive The New Age. With HG Wells, Bernard Shaw, GK Chesterton and Arnold Bennett she kept up well publicised differences of opinion. She also launched the careers of Ezra Pound and Katherine Mansfield. During the First World War she became the journal's Paris correspondent, gaining acclaim for her unique weekly insider reports. In her French years she lived with Amedeo Modigliani, who painted several famous portraits of her, setting a style in looks for the modern woman. Her friends included Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, and with Jean Cocteau she shared the love of Raymond Radiguet, the boy genius less than half her age. She claimed that, by the age of forty, she had had forty male lovers, among them The New Age editor AR Orage and leading modernist Wyndham Lewis. Forthright and controversial Hastings made many enemies, but throughout her life she wrote prolifically and eloquently, leaving a fascinating record of the world she lived in. She died by her own hand in 1943. In this absorbing biography Stephen Gray traces her entire career, separating the legend of Beatrice Hastings - the notoriously free woman portrayed in several works - from the bare facts.

Documents the key feminists who ignited the second wave women's movement. This work tells the stories of more than two thousand individual women and a few notable men who together reignited the women's movement and made permanent changes to entrenched customs and laws.

This book tells the remarkable story of Robert F. Williams--one of the most influential black activists of the generation that toppled Jim Crow and forever altered the arc of American history. In the late 1950s, as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, branch of the NAACP, Williams and his followers used machine guns, dynamite, and Molotov cocktails to confront Klan terrorists. Advocating "armed self-reliance" by blacks, Williams challenged not only white supremacists but also Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights establishment. Forced to flee during the 1960s to Cuba--where he broadcast "Radio Free Dixie," a program of black politics and music that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles and New York City--and then China, Williams remained a controversial figure for the rest of his life. Historians have customarily portrayed the civil rights movement as a nonviolent call on America's conscience--and the subsequent rise of Black Power as a violent repudiation of the civil rights dream. But Radio Free Dixie reveals that both movements grew out of the same soil, confronted the same predicaments, and reflected the same quest for African American freedom. As Robert Williams's story demonstrates, independent black political action, black cultural pride, and armed self-reliance operated in the South in tension and in tandem with legal efforts and nonviolent protest.