My story 'Instrument' released in a new fiction anthology

A new fiction anthology from New Lit Salon Press entitled Southern Gothic has just been released, and it contains a short story of mine entitled "Instrument."

The genesis of the story is this. In the mid-to-late 1990s, a phenomenon began at a Toronto area Pentecostal church called the Toronto Airport Vineyard. (Much as this sounds like an airport hotel, it was simply a branch of the Vineyard Fellowship of Pentecostal churches with an unusually anodyne name.) The phenomenon was marked by an outbreak of seemingly out-of-control emotional outbursts. The phenomenon came to be known as "the laughing revival" because one of the behaviors on the part of church attendees was uncontrolled laughter or crying. It lasted for years and spread to many other Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

I developed a morbid fascination with the phenomenon, which also took root in Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida. I was fascinated by the stories of wild behavior and the claims that the Holy Spirit was behind it all, when a distanced observer could clearly see it was nothing more than mass hysteria.

Despite my personal disdain for this brand of religion, I sensed that sincere people were flocking to such churches for a reason. They wanted not only experience, emotion, and entertainment, but also something genuine. They wanted what the revivalists were promising: not just an overflow of emotion, but to be truly changed.

With this in mind, I developed a story about someone who came to such a church out of curiosity. He's not a true believer, but a skeptic, a not-particularly-religious young man who looks at spirit-filled Christians not with envy but with pity. Nevertheless, he finds himself at one of these revivals, and is tempted by the offer of a truly changed life.

My character Roy is assistant manager of a Chevron station. But he has a secret wish: to become an EMT, an ambulance attendant. And when he attends the revival he is caught up in the experience and dares to think that despite his doubts his life might really change.

Southern Gothic, with my story and 14 others, is available now in many e-book formats, handsomely illustrated by Nathan Mark Philips.

Nutbag of the month: special 9/11 edition

Of course, a discussion of right-wing Christian nutbags would not be complete without mentioning Terry Jones, the "pastor" of an organization in Florida called the Dove World Outreach Center. (Despite its name, which makes it sound like the visitor center of a soap factory, it is a "tiny church," according to the New York Times.) Jones is the fellow who wants to burn copies of the Koran on Sep. 11.

Today's story in the NYT on the man and his plan draws attention to the fact that one of his justifications for the act of burning a Koran is a "never-reported story" of an attack on Christians by "radical Muslims" during the Balkan war in the 1990s. "Never-reported story" is the NYT's way of saying "completely made-up bullshit;" this is clear when the writer goes so far as to say:

To a reporter who worked in Bosnia during that war, the story Mr. Jones told on Wednesday sounds very like the kind of fictional tales of wartime atrocities against Christians that were cited by Bosnian Serbs and Croats at the time to justify the well-documented massacres of Muslims that did take place — like the murder of thousands of Muslim men and boys buried in mass graves around Srebrenica in 1995.

The story goes on to say that Jones is not just one more Florida cracker (like Chuck Baldwin); he and his wife led a church in Cologne, Germany until two years ago. And it gets weirder after that.