Tag: books

Churchianity

Jon Del Arroz’s new book, Churchianity: How Modern American Churches Corrupted Generations of Christians, is out today. The Foreword was written by a certain dark lord of your acquaintance. It’s a pretty long one, as these things go, so I’ve broken it into two parts, the second of which will run tomorrow.

Churchianity: The Great Apostasy

The modern Church in the West stands at a crossroads, though many of its congregants appear blissfully unaware that they have already chosen a wide and easy path to Hell. What passes for Christianity in the twenty-first century would be unrecognizable to the Church Fathers, incomprehensible to the medieval scholastics, and abhorrent to the Reformers. We are witnessing nothing less than the attempted replacement of Christianity with its heretical doppelganger: Churchianity.

Churchianity is the systematic subordination of Christian doctrine to the prevailing ideology of social justice. It is the elevation of worldly concerns above spiritual ones, the replacement of timeless Biblical authority with the dynamic mainstream Narrative, and the transformation of the Church from a beacon of eternal truth into an echo chamber for Earthly politics. Most damning of all, it represents the complete inversion of Christianity’s fundamental premise: instead of being in the world but not of it, Churchianity insists on being entirely of the world while maintaining an increasingly unconvincing veneer of theological legitimacy.

Churchianity is not just another in the long line of traditional doctrinal disputes. This is apostasy wearing a clerical collar, heresy draped in liturgical vestments, and blasphemy proclaimed from ten thousand pulpits every Sunday morning. The tragedy is not that wolves have entered the sheepfold—Jesus Christ himself warned us they would come. The tragedy is that the sheep now bleat in self-righteous pride as they are led astray by those who seek to destroy them.

At its core, Churchianity represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of both God and man. Whereas Christianity proclaims the fallen nature of humanity and the absolute necessity of divine redemption, Churchianity preaches the perfectibility of man through political correctness. Whereas Christianity promises the Kingdom of Heaven, Churchianity prioritizes earthly justice. And whereas Christianity demands repentance from sin, Churchianity demands repentance for a whole host of invented man-made sins, including failure to adequately genuflect before whatever victim class currently sits atop the intersectional hierarchy.

The mechanism of this theological perversion is breathtakingly simple: take any Biblical command, strip it of its soteriological context, and reinterpret it through the lens of contemporary social justice politics. “Love thy neighbor” ceases to be about individual charity and becomes a mandate for open borders and mass immigration. “Care for the poor” transforms from personal almsgiving into advocacy for higher taxes, foreign wars, and welfare states. “Welcome the stranger” transforms from basic hospitality into a divine command to facilitate the demographic replacement of the nation.

This hermeneutical vandalism not only does violence to individual verses, but to the entire Biblical narrative. The God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, who commanded the Israelites to maintain their distinctiveness among the nations, who confused the languages at Babel to create the nations—this God is reimagined as a cosmic social worker whose primary concern is ensuring equal outcomes across all demographic categories. The savior who said “My kingdom is not of this world” is recast as a proto-hippie community organizer whose death was not intended to atone for personal sins, but for 17th-century colonization.

No Christian Church has shown itself to be completely immune to this subversive contagion. The Roman Catholic Church, which for centuries stood as a bulwark against heresy, now finds itself led by clerics who are more concerned about climate change than for the salvation of men’s souls. The current occupant of Peter’s throne speaks more passionately about carbon emissions than abortion, more forcefully about income inequality than sexual morality, and far more frequently about migrants than martyrs. The Church that once launched the Crusades to defend Christendom now declares it a moral imperative to welcome to the West those who would see every cross destroyed and every cathedral burned to the ground.

The Anglican Communion, already weakened by its centuries of compromise with secular authority, has completed its transformation into the Conservative Party at prayer—if the Conservative Party were still conservative and one could find a Tory who was not Hindu, Muslim, or Jewish. Canterbury’s pronouncements are all-but-indistinguishable from Guardian editorials, complete with the requisite hand-wringing about colonialism, slavery, and the urgent need to make monetary reparations for crimes committed by people long dead to people who were never wronged.

The mainline Protestant denominations have fared even worse. The Lutherans who once thundered “Here I stand” now whimper “Here I kneel”—before every fashionable cause and politically correct crusade. The Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians compete to see who can more thoroughly repudiate their theological heritage in favor of sexual perversion, rainbow flags and moral relativism. These churches have hemorrhaged members in recent decades, not because Christianity is dying, but because Churchianity offers nothing that cannot be found in a political party or a gay disco.

Even the evangelical churches, which initially resisted this insidious corruption, have begun to succumb. Megachurch pastors discover that sermon series on “social justice” fill more seats than expositions of Romans. Youth pastors find that endorsing movements like Black Lives Matter provides them with more social cachet than leading Bible studies. Entire denominations that once prioritized evangelism now prioritize “racial reconciliation,” which in practice means white self-flagellation and endless apologies for nonexistent sins neither committed nor inherited.

CHURCHIANITY by Jon Del Arroz is now available in ebook and paperback from Amazon from Rislandia Press.

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The Fictional Western

Morgan posted an interesting history of the fictional Western at Arkhaven:

The American fictional western arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century with the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian in 1902. The novel created the archetype of the cowboy as hero. The western story quickly became the mythic literature of the recently closed American frontier. A popular genre in the hands of Zane Gray, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, and Frederick Faust (“Max Brand”) to name a few in the legion of western fictioneers in the form of novels, pulp magazines, and later mass-market paperback books. If J. R. R. Tolkien attempted to create a mythology for England, the western writers created a mythology for the United States of America. Many stories had a setting vaguely late 19th Century time and place. Frederick Faust best known as “Max Brand” often set his stories in an undefined “mountain desert.” He used myths and epics as the plot basis for many of his westerns. Faust’s Hired Guns adapted the Iliad for example.

The western genre was a large part of the pulp magazine market from 1920 to the 1950s, possibly having the majority share. Some pulp fiction writers could be described as generalists, they wrote in various genres. Will F. Jenkins as “Murray Leinster” could be found in the pages of Cowboy Stories, Astounding Stories, Clues Detective, and “Swords and Mongols” in Golden Fleece. Frederick Faust wrote historical adventure under the “George Challis” for Argosy magazine in the 1930s. Faust had the Tizzo series set in the time of Renaissance Italy during the time of Cesare Borgia. He also had the pirate novel “The Naked Blade” in Argosy. Those swashbucklers would later be reprinted in paperback form decades later. At the same time, he was writing spy stories as “Frederick Frost.”

The fictional western story underwent the transformation during and after World War II that had earlier taken place with the detective story as written by Dashiell Hammett. The writing became leaner and more historically accurate. The protagonists were morally ambiguous men (and women) who had lived hard lives. Les Savage Jr. was a pioneer with a hard-boiled presentation coupled with a setting of 1820 to the1850s. The indistinct time and place of the mythic western gave way to the historical western.

Read the whole thing there. I will say that while I’m not a huge Louis L’Amour fan, I very much liked FAIR BLOWS THE WIND. Which, of course, isn’t a Western, but does set the stage for a series of them.

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GUNS OF MARS

I’m very pleased to be able to say that like Easton Press and Franklin Library before them, Castalia Library is finally in the Signed First Edition business. Over the next month, we are offering no less than THREE Signed First Editions, beginning with GUNS OF MARS by Chuck Dixon.

GUNS OF MARS: A Thrilling Return to the Red Planet

Chuck Dixon delivers a masterful homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic Barsoom series with “Guns of Mars,” a tale that captures all the adventure and wonder of the original while bringing fresh energy to the dying world of Mars.

Like Burroughs’ timeless stories, Dixon transports readers to a harsh but magnificent Barsoom where water is more precious than gold and survival depends on strength, cunning, and an unbreakable will. The novel follows the unlikely partnership between a mysterious human bounty hunter and Kal Keddaq, a fierce Warhoon thark fleeing the consequences of his own choices.

Dixon expertly recreates Burroughs’ signature blend of high adventure and exotic world-building. The Martian landscape comes alive with all its deadly beauty – from the vast canal systems of a forgotten civilization to the savage creatures that prowl the wastes. What sets GUNS OF MARS apart is Dixon’s grittier, more realistic approach to survival on the red planet. While maintaining the romantic adventure spirit of the original series, he grounds the action in believable consequences and genuine peril. The central quest drives a plot that builds to a spectacular confrontation between man, thark, and the monstrous guardians of Mars’ greatest treasure.

Dixon, known for his work on BATMAN and THE PUNISHER, brings his talent for character-driven action to create protagonists who are both heroic and deeply flawed. The evolving relationship between the bounty hunter and the exiled thark forms the emotional core of a story that honors Burroughs’ legacy while standing as a thrilling adventure in its own right.

For fans of the original Barsoom novels and newcomers alike, GUNS OF MARS offers everything that made Burroughs’s Mars irresistible: exotic locales, deadly creatures, ancient mysteries, and the kind of two-fisted adventure that belongs among the classics of planetary romance.

For more details about GUNS OF MARS, including an excerpt and information on where to buy it, visit the Castalia Library substack.

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Not Martin, Not Sanderson

I think we have to face it. I’m the best candidate to finish A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE:

Over the last year and a half the excuses for A Song of Ice And Fire being incomplete and George R.R. Martin’s inability to finish The Winds of Winter have become more than absurd. The author has gone from blaming toxic fandom, to talking about Trump and fascism in 2024, to a 2025 where he made it clear he’s definitely not even working on the project.

This year alone he’s started a bar in Santa Fe New Mexico and taken on a new project for an animated Hercules movie, leaving fans who started in A Game Of Thrones with the obvious fact that he’s not going to be finishing the series before he dies. In fact, he’s already given interviews stating he’s probably not going to finish it in his lifetime.

It’s become beyond a joke to fans at this juncture, as most people just want him to be honest about the situation, which for whatever reason, Martin refuses to do.

At Worldcon, one fan was bold enough to ask George R.R. Martin the question, one that now has been condemned as “rude” or “inappropriate” despite it being anything but in the context of a panel on the future of epic fantasy.

A bold female fan asked in a hostile room, “George, you’re not gonna be around for much longer. And this is a tough question. This is more directed at Brandon. I was wondering, like, how would you feel about someone else taking over and finishing the books?”

The crowd immediately starts booing as if the question didn’t make any sense, though it is a poignant one especially since Brandon Sanderson was brought in to take over A Wheel Of Time from Robert Jordan upon his passing.

Sanderson can be heard saying “not me,” during the uproar, confirming he wouldn’t be the one to do the job.

George R.R. Martin is so panicked about the question that he immediately gets up to leave the panel.

That’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. I’m one of the very few authors who has successfully written epic fantasy, as I’ll be finishing A GRAVE OF GODS in the next two years. ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT is one of the few that generally receives better reviews than A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and furthermore, they look pretty great in leather.

The only problem is that I am almost certainly the very last person on the planet whom George R.R. Martin would select to finish the series. Would I do it if I was asked? Certainly. I already have a pretty good idea how I would fix the structural problem that prevented Martin from finishing it and provide a much better end to the series than Martin and the HBO producers did.

But I have enough to do in making sure that I bring my own series to an end with a satisfying conclusion. Considering how few epic fantasy authors manage to do that, I think it’s a sufficiently difficult challenge that I need not lament the fact that Martin’s is unlikely to end well. Anyhow, my theory is that it’s actually been completed, but Martin prefers to have it published postmortem since he’s still feeling abused by the public reaction to the HBO series and he doesn’t want to risk going through all that again.

Speaking of books, I should mention that tomorrow is the last day to acquire the backer editions of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. I further note that later this week, we’ll announce the three Signed First Editions that will be produced in very limited runs and will be available for just one month starting later this week. The related and very good news is that we’ve worked out a deal with multiple parties to a) acquire the new machines and b) sell the old ones for the price we paid for them, so assuming that we sell a few of the special editions we’ll be announcing, everything should work out at least as well as we’d planned.

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Backing the Bindery

Now that THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY are ready to go to print, we’re giving everyone two weeks to become a retro-backer of the bindery before we place the order for the interiors. For more details and interior images of the two books, including the title pages, please visit the Castalia Library substack. We’re also looking into the possibility of making them signed and numbered editions, if that’s of interest. Although Homer is obviously unavailable, we could arrange for them to be signed by either a) the bookbinder or b) me, depending upon which would make these very special editions even more desirable.

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The Revised Schedule

The results of the subscribers’ poll, in which nearly one-third of the Library subscribers made their opinions known, are now available on the Castalia Library substack. The new schedules have also been announced. A brief summary:

  • Library goes to 4 books per year. Price unchanged.
  • Libraria goes to 4 books per year. Price reduced.
  • History goes to 3 books per year. Prices unchanged.
  • Cathedra stays at 2 books per year. Price unchanged.
  • Refunds provided to all Library, History, and Libraria subscribers upon request. Details at the substack.

The entire team is in agreement that this plan is the best we are able to do in the circumstances. It might be worth noting that this was a community effort, as it was a subscriber who came up with the plan in the first place.

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Express Yourself

After some discussion, analysis, and research, we believe we’ve come up with a plan to address the panoply of rising costs of producing the world’s most beautiful books in a painless manner.

If you’re a Castalia subscriber, please read it, take part in the poll, and let us know what you think in the comments there. Please note that nothing has been decided yet, we’re just trying to come up with a plan that will work for everyone and maintain future viability without imposing unnecessary expenses on anyone.

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Castalia and the Cost of Tariffs

So President Trump has imposed a 39 percent tariff on Switzerland. This has a direct impact on all the Castalia Library books now being produced in Switzerland, beginning with the Byzantine histories and Dracula. Now, the tariff is imposed on the declared value, not the retail price, so it’s not quite as bad as it looks, but it is a bit of a problem going forward since the discounts provided to subscribers for paying in advance don’t account for this additional expense to the 12 or so books now in production.

Now, even if we jacked up the subscription prices by 40 percent, our books would be a much-better value than Easton Press books, which go for $168. However, we know things are tight, and we don’t want to price our books out of the reach of subscribers who can’t afford a price increase right now.

So what we’re contemplating doing is to add a T-version of our base subscriptions to Library and History, similar to the Euro version of History, that will allow those subscribers who can a) afford the additional tariff cost and b) want to support the bindery. Libraria and Cathedra prices have a sufficient cushion to absorb the additional expense; we priced Cathedra with the expectation that there would be a tariff, although we were hoping for something in the 10-15 percent range. That would mean increasing the monthly subscription price from $50 to $75 for Library.

Another option, indeed, one that we’d originally contemplated from the start, is going back to producing all the US books in the USA, while producing the higher-quality books from the Bindery for Europe and the rest of the world. This would complicate our production runs, but since we could still produce all the interior book blocks from the same tariff-neutral location, would be entirely viable from a manufacturing standpoint. The primary downside is that we would have to establish another shipping operation instead of being able to rely solely on the US one.

Speaking of US production, THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON has passed the stamp test and will be getting bound and shipped to the warehouse very soon.

Anyhow, if you’re a Library, History, or Cathedra subscriber, please feel free to share your thoughts on how you think we should address the situation.

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Last Call for Coffee

One of the elite rewards of the Hypergamouse campaign was the Coffee Table Book, which is a large horizontal edition with only two panels per page, thereby spreading out each episode to two pages and permitting larger panels and higher resolution art. This backer’s edition is now available at NDM Express as well as at the Arkhaven store and features the first 100 episodes of the popular comic as well as the nine episodes of the original black-and-white comic drawn by the original illustrator. NDM Express is recommended if you have credit card issues at Arkhaven.

There are more details at Sigma Game if you’re interested, including a picture of a test binding of the Hypergamouse leather edition in the new burgundy pigskin. But today is the last day to obtain a copy of this special edition with a very limited print run of less than 150.

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