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The Yoke of Bondage
A novella by L.D. Wenzel
Charles Wesley Wolff is the son of John Wesley Wolff, the
conservative Christian media mogul from Red Grange, Illinois.
Charles was life seemed destined. After receiving the best education
possible, he was to take on the religious mantle of his father.
Charles' life, however, takes a strange turn. While still an
undergraduate an Evangelical college, he rejects his father's
fundamentalist world and would be a disciple of his favorite
philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. |
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To escape his father's wrath, Charles
impulsively joins the military. But here he goes from the frying
pan into the fire and ends up on an isolated Coast Guard station
on Padre Island south of Corpus Christi. Clem Jackson, a psychopath
boatswain mate and officer in charge, hates Christians. Charles
fails to convince Clam of his "falling away" and is
bullied and harassed without end. The child of destiny is reduced
to a subservient peon. His misfortune accelerates when he gets
in the way Clem's smuggling of illegal immigrants. Charles tries
to cope with his present miserable situation by using Nietzschean
ideals. His Christian past always has a way of following him…
Read
an excerpt of the Yoke of Bondage on pdf
The Angelic Awareness Awakening
A novel in process - by L.D.
Wenzel
The novella, The Yoke of
Bondage will hopefully be Part one of a larger novel
that I am presently writing. The Angelic Awareness Awakening
is the story of Simon Magister, professor of Romantic literature
at Bethlehem College. When the school imports C. S. Lewis scholar,
Dr. Niles Humphrey to increase its status in C.S. Lewis scholarship,
Simon is not impressed. Humphrey's claim to fame is that he had
personally studied under C.S. Lewis at Oxford. Trouble begins
when anti-fantasy Fundamentalists publish a flyer called Lewis,
the Witch in the Wardrobe--Come Out! which claims that Lewis
was a secret member in the occult society the Priory of Sion. |
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Simon discards such claims as ridiculous, but becomes
suspicious:
1) When he accidentally sees the
emblem of Priory of Sion tattooed on Niles Humphrey's
shoulder;
2) When a student, outspokenly critical
of the Narnia tales, is mysteriously killed by a hit and run
car.
Meanwhile, Simon Magister's interest in Romanticism spills
over to the youth group at the local Methodist Church, where
Simon and his wife are adult leaders. One evening, the closing
devotions go farther than expected when Simon and a few loyal
literature students have an religious experience where God, the
universe, and themselves are ONE. This "unifying" event
and it theological overtones spread to other prayer meetings
on campus and even sister Evangelical colleges. In short, Simon
finds himself embroiled as the heretical leader of a "pantheistic"
movement, The Angelic Awareness Awakening. Though Simon rigorously
defends his position as Christian, he is kicked out of Bethlehem
and ends up leader of Paradise, a commune where esoteric
Christians of the "Angelical persuasion" find refuge.Charles
Wesley Wolf, his father, and others from The Yoke of Bondage
story find their way into this story as well.
While this book under development and story line incomplete,
one of the my goals is to develop a (fictitious) Christian Romanticism
that engages esoteric thought. This project is long from finished
and I hope to see the book in print within a couple of years.
January 2006 |