Compelling sequel to Lancelot’s Grail about finding self-awareness and enlightenment during the dark ages that followed the fall of Camelot.

Ragtime is old hat, World War I is over, and the Roaring Twenties are underway. Cherie, an American flapper living it up in Paris, never intends to go back to her tiny hometown, Taos, New Mexico. But while visiting her sister in New York, a telegram brings word that an old friend, Morgan, is dying. Ragtime dudes Morgan and Jack, and wife Abigail, helped the sisters when their mother died. Now it’s time to repay the favor. They arrive in Taos to find Abigail overwhelmed, Jack’s in denial about Morgan’s fate, and Abigail’s son, Cyrus, is suffering from shell-shock—just like veterans Cherie’s seen in Paris. Touched by his plight, Cherie nurtures him. It’s not long before they fall in love. Abigail fears that once Cherie returns to Paris, Cyrus will be worse off than before. Cherie misunderstands and thinks mother hen wants her out of the picture. When Bryce, another friend from the days of ragtime, arrives, Morgan experiences a brief rally and asks to be driven to a place in the Taos Mountains he’s always found spiritual. On the mountaintop, the Parisian flapper, the ragtime dudes, and their strange, extended family find themselves at the threshold of a thin place in this charming sequel.

It’s 1904. St. Louis, birthplace of the hottest new music craze, Ragtime, is hosting a World’s Fair that everyone wants to see. Three fun-loving New York dandies are already planning to attend the Fair when a newspaper photo of them dallying with a colleen from Brooklyn sets a pair of Irish boxers on their trail. With the pugilists mere days behind them, they hastily hop a train to St. Louis. Aboard a Pullman sleeper, the dandies meet three sisters from New Jersey, free-thinkers whose view of morality seems to match the dandies’ own. Quickly, they pair off in couples for a romantic journey. But as the train nears St. Louis, the sisters reveal they are going to the Fair to meet marriageable, titled, European aristocrats. That obviously precludes the New Yorkers. They arrive for opening day of the largest world’s fair ever held—a dazzling sight. Over the next two weeks, the dandies keep bumping into the sisters; the sisters keep snubbing them; and the pursuing boxers keep just missing them. As the Irishmen close in, the New Yorkers hear of an art colony forming out West, and the idea of opening an emporium in distant New Mexico seems as brilliant as the Fair’s electric lights. The men rush to buy enough goods to start a business and get out of town before the boxers find them.

Dick Gartee is a time traveler who has journeyed ninety-three years from the past—one day at a time. During the Great Depression, the only hockey puck in the neighborhood slides onto thin skim-ice and nine-year-old Dick heroically skates after it. When his father leaves his mother for another woman, plucky thirteen-year-old Dick takes a night job in a bakery to help his mother make ends meet. At seventeen, with World War II raging, he enlists in the Navy and rises from gunner mate to payroll and disbursements. By age twenty, the Navy trusts him with two million dollars cash. In the post-war years, he teaches himself engineering, builds factories, and designs manufacturing production lines and industrial robots. Elements of daily life that seemed ordinary to Dick are inconceivable to young people today. His biography provides context for key transformative eras of America’s recent past as Dick faces tribulations and joys with morality, humor, and humility. Younger readers will be astonished to learn how people managed before smartphones while older generations will smile as they recall anecdotes their parents shared. But no matter your age, you will be charmed by Dick’s story, and maybe you will discover some things you didn’t already know.

Ragtime is new, Victorians are out, and free love is on the rise. New York dandies Bryce, Jack, and Morgan open an emporium in the nascent art colony of Taos, New Mexico, promising to bring metropolitan culture and the latest wonders from the St. Louis World's Fair. The problem—none of them knows how to run a business. Free love? That they understand. Soon, the handsome young New Yorkers meet freethinking women ready to test the mores of a new century. With too little capital, their venture struggles until a leading member of Taos society begins holding teas for her inner circle at their store. But just as the business starts to thrive, the ladies usurp the tea parties to hire a Protestant pastor and are sent a recently ordained Universalist minister. Calamities pile up. The Universalist's sermons don’t go over well in Catholic Taos and the ensuing religious conflict hurts the emporium's business. Meanwhile, the men lose a lucrative Gramophone deal, and while Morgan’s trying to fix that, they get shaken down by a brothel owner. Then, Jack’s landlady dies, leaving him responsible for her nearly grown daughters. Oh yeah, and Bryce quits to join a peyote cult. Yet even as the partners fail at transforming Taos, Taos begins to transform them. And by the time the emporium goes belly up, they are ready to start their lives over again.

New age teachings on self-awareness and enlightenment are explored in an Arthurian-age story of two siblings' journey to enlightenment after they discover Sir Lancelot living as a hermit and uncover his knowledge of the Holy Grail.

Alura and Frith, abandoned at an abbey as children, have grown up in social isolation and are desperate for a new life.
Sir Bedivere, desolate over the knights' abandonment of the Round Table after the fall of Camelot, has come up with a plan.
Sir Lancelot, abandoned by his once-adoring public, has found enlightenment while living as a hermit.

Their lives converge when Frith leads Sir Bedivere to Lancelot’s hermitage. There, they learn that Lancelot has found the Holy Grail – within himself. Bedivere tries, without success, to persuade Lancelot to come help him rebuild the Knights of The Round Table. After Bedivere departs, Frith begs Lancelot to teach him, hoping to become a knight. Soon Alura joins them, hoping to snare herself a husband.

Lancelot, torn between a desire to be left alone and an obligation to pass his knowledge on, agrees to teach them, but soon realizes that everyone simply wants to use him. Yet, seeing the spark of awareness growing in Alura and Frith, he persists and leads them on a quest to penetrate the barriers in themselves that keep them from attaining the Grail.

Then Alura falls in love with Lancelot and incites an angry mob. Bedivere urges Lancelot to flee, but Lancelot stays, struggling to finish his work with Alura and Frith in the little time he has left.

Under Lancelot’s tutelage Alura and Frith come of age, but the ideas presented in Lancelot’s Grail invite the reader to reconsider what coming of age really means.

A critical edition of 12 complete sermons, 2 prayers before sermon, and 5 excerpts from the Cambridge catechetical lectures.

Examining the mimetic theory of René Girard, this book investigates the development of society as a result of an original crime (a murder) that shaped the way the earliest humans organized the social structures we live with today - an analysis that reveals the dangerous structure of the most basic social relationships. With attention to family relationships, A Genealogy of Social Violence sheds light on the processes by which the traditional nuclear family, through the mimetic behaviour of children, embeds violence into human desires and hence society as whole. Challenging the thought of Girard and of Rawls in order to offer a new understanding of justice, this book suggests that in order to achieve a more peaceful society, what is required is not the self-defeating narrative of equality, developed in order to manage the violence engendered by our social institutions, but a reconceptualisation of the nuclear family structure. A striking critique of modern society, which draws on religion, mythology, literature, history, philosophy and political theory, A Genealogy of Social Violence will be of interest to social and political theorists, as well as philosophers working in the area of contemporary social and European thought.