Böcker av John King

4 short stories x 4 flash fiction with North Yorkshire associations text, graphics and photos

This work represents the daydreaming of a retired minister of his perfect church. It becomes a study of the Beatitudes. The beatitudes are the key to interpreting Scripture because they speak of the Cross. They are, themselves, a pastoral hermeneutic that is the scriptwriter for every sermon and the voice of all biblical counsel. A thousand theologians would have a thousand different views on this dynamic text and all would be right. In a thousand sermons and homilies we have not begun to uncover the secrets contained here for living a holy life. The way of holiness is locked away in these verses?even though Jesus gave us the key, "follow me" (John 12:26)

My best poems, a few short stories as I see them, a review of 73 years of life, and a tribute to Daisy, who in a new way revealed God to me. Poetry like any art is best judged by the artist writing them. Many are recently written but some date during my college days.

I had been accused by church leadership of preaching a more psychological rather than theological message but was this not what Jesus did the day He taught His disciples the secret to being happy? (Matthew 5:1-10 ?blessed? means ?happy?) The Beatitudes, as we called them are not attributes of God, nor do they represent the 10 commandments, nor are they fruit of the Spirit. The Beatitudes are no theology. They profile the heart of a follower of Christ whose focus is on following Him. A true follower stripped of all other passions is possessed of no other interest. There is no scripture more psychologically revealing of a true follower of Christ than here.

I find the thought reasonable that on the eve of man?s final day on earth, God Who controls all things will decide our destiny. Only God who made the world should have the right to destroy it; so as time runs down, as man draws closer to discovering the means of his own destruction and the disposition to use it, as a believer I trust God to intervene. This is the backdrop here for my inquiry into scripture?not to confirm this scene, which I maintain is inevitable, but to apply an academic inquisitiveness into the Book of all books, asking one question: What happens to mankind then? This will be the first day after the last day ...the day after time.

The plan for our salvation was drawn up in the ages past by our Lord to encompass, not just those final acts of forgiveness but, the entire span of our Savior's sojourn among us. As the earthly life of the Savior comes to its climactic conclusion, so does the fury of the opposing darkness. Whatever devilish plans may have been held in reserve over the 30 or so years Jesus was among us, have inevitably and predictably, on the eve of His death, burst forth in all its rage. As Jesus approached Golgotha, He invited more and more people to involve themselves in some way in the confrontation. What was once a very private conversation on some forsaken hillside with His twelve discussing His sufferings and death, had become a sermon "shouted from the housetops." It is the Story of when the light invaded the blackness of a spiritual night. It is the Story of when God walked among us.

Nice People- a new collection of flash fiction and other writing set in and around Nice, France

Guy Psycho and the Postmodernaires don't have the credit to outlast the week when an enigmatic billionaire offers them five million dollars for a private performance of their lounge act.Somehow, that performance includes re-enacting an ancient Assyrian epic deep inside a mountain in Tennessee, in the sub-basement of a mountainside mansion that leads all the way to ancient Mesopotamia.To escape, Guy and his bandmates must retrieve a rumored thirteenth tablet of Gilgamesh. If they don't, they can't spend the five million, and worse, they'll be 5,000 years early for their gig at the Sabre Room.

Radio drama: London West End 1970, Can successful playwright Edward Carstairs survive the changes in music, theatre, everywhere...?

Prog and other dramatic variations on a musical theme. Theatre and radio drama, dialogue, monologue, flash fiction...

You know what would really fuck them off? If you went out there and found the least suitable, most inappropriate, most outrageous hunk of a man that this fine city has to offer, and the pair of you rock up to that church service in May, arm in arm. Seán is feeling wronged because his boyfriend Tim has been excluded from a family wedding back home in Ireland. What does it matter that they've just broken up? The problem for his family is that Tim is femme, fabulous and worst of all, English. Spurred on by righteous anger, Seán is determined to do something about it. As Greek myths, hook-up apps, and the musical stylings of Sinéad O'Connor collide, Seán launches into his hunt for the most disruptive plus-one possible.

AFTER spending-it seems like-10 lifetimes as a pastor/teacher alerting the church to its endless history of inflicting pain on the very persons they claim to love, I have come to the realization that instead of talking about repentance all the time, broken relationships might be better addressed from the other side: forgiveness. My whole idea behind this booklet is a peaceful meandering through my past, reading as I go, the monuments marking the battlefield where conflicts happened. As I go, I puzzle over the meaning of forgiveness and whether or not I have learned to cherish it for the divine gift it is.

THIS work is a reaction to a postmodern sexual freedom- and subsequent redefining of the terms of relationship-that are affecting the moral conscience of my grandchildren who naively assume that a grandparent's code of ethics and morals is old fashion and out-of-date-an impractical ideology. A postmodern world recommends a level of sexual freedom where the physical pleasure is emphasized over the relationship and over love, something about which a grandparent has a loving interest in cautioning against. All grandpa has to serve his interest in this regard is his near half century romance with grandma, of which he speaks freely to lovingly encourage the grandchildren to choose a lifestyle that will support spiritual and emotional health as well as help them discover a deep and enduring friendship and romance with the person of their choosing. This brief work is the product of that interest, a story, as told -as the title reads-in grandma's eyes.

A lifelong engagement with veganism is presented in this story of a frustration with the meat and dairy industries heading towards a potentially violent and vengeful culmination. Author of "The Football Factory".

A poem, beautifully illustrated, of a child's inspirational journey: a boy who finds a ladder to the stars.

The concept of 'having a mind' is one of the key concepts that we use to carve a division of extreme significance into the universe. We say that parts of the universe 'have a mind' and that parts of the universe do not 'have a mind'. But what exactly is a mind? In this book John King claims that to have a mind is to think; this may seem obvious. But on route to this conclusion he discards a multitude of views concerning the mental - that 'having a mind' is to do with freedom, or awareness, or intentionality, or perception, or feeling states, or the inner cause of certain movements, or a 'central core' of these attributes. This analysis is sure to help the reader clarify their own beliefs about what a mind is.

We ordinarily take the universe to be as it appears to us to be. So, when one observes a red rose in one's garden, one ordinarily assumes that the part of the universe that is one's garden contains a red rose. However, when one takes oneself outside of one's ordinary state of interaction with the universe; when one starts to reflect and rationalise about the nature of one's relationship with the universe; then, things become more complicated than the state of affairs belied by our 'ordinary' assumptions. In this book John King outlines why the world that appears to one is perceiver-dependent, why identical sets of perceptions can lead to very different conceptions of the nature of the universe, why one's perceptual apparatus is inevitably constrained, and why this inevitable constraint leads to some conceptions of the universe being favoured over others.