The Epiphany Deception

The first novel in a new trilogy unravels the ancient shroud of evil and unmasks the ominous forces preparing humanity for a powerful delusion. All mankind becomes ensnared by this spectacular revelation, except for those brave enough to peer behind the dark curtain and behold the truth.

What follows in these writings is an account of my experiences, with the exception of some brief background focusing mainly from the time period of 1998 to present. It is not my intention to purport any sort of authoritative misguided stance of truth that beckons your adherence; rather it is that which is aptly titled, A Journey of Self Deception. Make of it what you will, for in all honesty it is still my greatest struggle to decipher what if any meaning there was and is in all if not any of it. Im not under any delusive pretense that this is of if any sort of import, as you will see for yourself I went that road. Rather I get the strange sense that this will be therapeutic and perhaps cautionary to those who seek higher or greater understanding from falling into the same mind traps I did. Insanity or Epiphany, I still dont know!

The Rev. Martin A. Recio served 30 years in the Pastoral Office. His degrees include a BA in History from Northwestern College; a BD from San Francisco Theological Seminary; and a JD from Lincoln Law School, Sacramento, California. He and his wife, Lorene, have one daughter, two sons, and seven grandchildren. He and his wife live in Ashland, Oregon. I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith, Looking for...the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ Who gave himself for us that he might redeem us...and purify unto himself a people zealous for good works. For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men-the apostle St. Paul.

""If Your Baby Could Talk" should be mandatory reading. It is a prescription for accountability and success--a unique checklist for all ages and stages of parenthood." David Patillo, Christian singer, songwriter, and musician. (Practical Life)

In the years following World War I, the “international” emerged as a distinct scale of political and cultural focus. Internationalisms proliferated in kind as writers and thinkers sought to imagine modes of cooperation that would balance transnational solidarities with national sovereignty. While so-called political realists across the twentieth century have regarded such attempts as wishful thinking, Aarthi Vadde argues that the negotiation of wishing and thinking is at the very heart of internationalism. In Chimeras of Form, she shows why modernist literary form is essential to understanding the aspirational and analytical force of internationalism in and beyond Europe. Major writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith use modernist strategies to reshape how readers think about the cohesion and interrelation of political communities in the wake of empire. Vadde lucidly explains how their formal experiments with the novel, short story, poetry, and political essay contribute to and sometimes even anticipate debates in postcolonial theory and cosmopolitanism. She reads Joyce’s use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie, and demonstrates how the “plotless” works of McKay and Lamming upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of twenty-first-century writers Smith and Shailja Patel shows how ongoing conflicts around migration, displacement, and global economic inequality link modernist, postcolonial, and contemporary traditions of literature. Vadde brings these traditions together to reveal the dual nature of internationalism as an ambition, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse vital to understanding our present moment.

One of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome. Working from the theories of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smith characterizes Aeneas as a voyant-visible, a person who both sees and is seen and who approaches the world through the faculty of vision. Engaging in close readings of key episodes throughout the poem, Smith shows how Aeneas repeatedly acts on what he sees rather than what he hears. Smith views Aeneas' final act of slaying Turnus, a character associated with the power of oratory, as the victory of vision over rhetoric, a triumph that reflects the ascendancy of visual symbols within Augustan society. Smith's new interpretation of the predominance of vision in the Aeneid makes it plain that Virgil's epic contributes to a new visual culture and a new mythology of Imperial Rome.

The purpose of this book is to present a comprehensive review of deception, its essential component of neurolinguistic dialectics, and how it is used by Satan to corrupt the human mind from devotion to Jesus Christ. These theological subjects are explored in an interdisciplinary fashion in an attempt to reveal historical knowledge of religious and secular developments of the ages needed to understand spiritual failure, deception, sin, apostasy, the role of the human mind as the venue or battlefield of deception, and how faith in God becomes weak and susceptible to doubt. Always at issue here is "why humanity replicates behavior that regresses to the same results of apostasy and utter spiritual failure induced by deception?" This interdisciplinary approach eludes the prototypical, one-dimensional approach to understanding deception and sin and presents the reader with a "how to" methodology that will hopefully defeat deception and sin. It also shows how deception results from heretical doctrine advanced by false prophets and preachers. Moreover, this book will help readers hone their skills necessary to examine issues of contemporary life with critical thinking in the context of religious and human history that facilitates their becoming better human beings.

An important addition to understanding natural selection, these essays redefine wealth and identify a sustainable spirituality using the perspectives of scientific research and historical wisdom.