Nathanael grabs the spear. He shuts his left eye to place his prey in his cross-hairs, then releases the javelin with Odyssean accuracy. But the creature parries. The spear gets stuck in the heart of a warrior in a painting that the king had commissioned 15 years prior.

A woman coughs up blood in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles where her husband stands next to her bed, rubbing her back, helping her expel pink phlegm into his handkerchief. At a table for two, at nearby diner, a deep voice punctuates the greasy air that smells of Saturday Night’s Special:…

Before there was time, before there were gods, before there were blood sacrifices, before there were written words, Light spoke and split the atom of nothing. Time was dragged into existence, filling empty space. Some call “nothing” chaos, but chaos is disorder, which is something. It’s not even darkness, for darkness is a black top…

Vampires as a whole mock the celebration of Christmas on December 25th, knowing that it’s merely a placeholder on the Julian calendar. But don’t mistake these vampires for blood-sucking atheists. They believe wholeheartedly in the power of Jesus’s blood. They observe Maundy Thursday as the most important day of the year. Conversely, on that day, true believers partake of the sacrament of communion as Christ showed them what it truly means to be devoted to God and to each other. But for these hideous creatures, the body and blood of Christ are a means to an end of survival. They believe Jesus to be the last prophet in “the order of Cain” these last 1,500 years, to save them from one called “the Impaler.”

The day of his release from The Farm she took him to his favorite po’ boy establishment where she presented him with a possible solution to permanently crush the source of his agonizing quandary about the existence of providence and freewill by performing a radical surgical procedure, which could theoretically remove the part of his brain responsible for the freedom of the will to make autonomous choices, according to the Cartesian view that the pineal gland is the hub where the mind and body unite and interact, making decisions that could’ve been otherwise. By removing this gland, as well as the adjacent midline region of the brain, the corpus callosum, which is responsible for connecting left and right cerebral hemispheres, and then replacing it with an A.I. Vertex database housed inside a silicon neuromorphic chip with 1,000,000,000 times more dense “neurons” than the corpus callosum, Griffin would be the first walking humanoid robot, able to process information faster than any computer and able to react faster to both the rational and emotional sides of his brain, simultaneously thinking and feeling like no other person alive. Griffin was in favor of the innovative procedure. The date was set. He was made aware of possible complications, including a high percent chance of mortality. The neuro-surgeon who performed the operation was paid handsomely for his time and discretion.

…Hobbes believes people need to be ruled by a Sovereign—a Sovereign with no emotions, desires, or freewill. No, the drastic range of variability within each of those aspects of human nature will never lead to the summum bonum or “the greatest good” necessary to live the good life. The competing conceptions of the good lead only to chaos and war, a “war of all against all.” A social contract is needed for the religious community or the commonwealth founded for the common good of all. Ironically, Hobbes’s catalyst to peace is grounded on a negative view of human nature. The summum malum or “the greatest evil” is used in order to keep the peace, which is stipulated by the social contract. This evil is the fear of violent death given the state of nature or lawless condition of man vs. man. Thus, a Sovereign without wayward human characteristics—a hyper-intelligent Transhuman incapable of disobeying orders—is Hobbes’s contribution to the revolution, from the kingdom of God (the kingdom of already-but-not-yet) or the “kingdom of darkness,” as he likes to call it, to the kingdom of once-and-for-all, Hobbes’s temporal kingdom of absolute rule.

This is a unique conference that marries rational apologetics to imaginative apologetics, the art of defending truth claims and the art of creatively expressing truth claims.

Yes, My Friends, This multi-faceted, multi-challenging, multi-year project is finally complete. With 120 poems, 70 prose, and 10 short stories–that will simultaneously stretch and encourage you–From the Ashes We Rise is a literary force to be read and reckoned with. This book seamlessly weaves Arts and Apologetics all throughout its 556 pages. See why From…

“Burn it?” questions the fat man whose fascination with the “naughty and nice” book has inadvertently eclipsed the genesis of Christmas—the true story of God making a way where there was no way, to save the lost when the lost could never be found.

Sean happens to be thinking the same thing. “If I were to revive his brain, will he end up in the first body or the second body?” A sudden pang of doubt deflates his hope of winning the Nobel Prize for the first successful brain-transplant. “What if his brain doesn’t make it? Then the two people, who’ve put their trust in me and donated their bodies in the name of ‘brain research’ when they died, died in vain. No, I can’t believe that! I know what I believe: logical possibilities ground metaphysical possibilities. Option one is logical and thus ontologically possible.” He swallows a gulp of air. “I have to keep working.”