Re: Allegory #3 - ...and the last shall be first

Not to puff you up or anything, but I think your mind is incredible. The things you come up with (words of encouragement, allegories, scripture references, etc) are amazing. I wonder how you do it. It seems easy for you. Your posts challenge and encourage me. The George Orwell short story that had the Christian allegories may have been called "The Hanging" or something like that. It's very similar to another short story of his called Shooting An Elephant (of which I also wrote an essay -- about his writing style). If I remember right, "The Hanging" is about a young boy witnessing an eastern-Indian being hung by the British. There was a lot of symbolism in the scene, the way he walked to be hung, his footprints being left in the mud, something about a fish, some water, and then his calling out to "Ram!" (his god) before dying (which brings to mind Jesus crying out to the Father on the cross and also the ram in the thicket when Abraham, by faith, went to sacrifice Isaac, and then there's the similarity between Jesus and Isaac also!). I thought Orwell's story was full of Christian imagery. Not sure if it was intended or not. I think you should pursue a book on criticism, but you seem to have so much on your plate already, which doesn't surprise me at all considering your talents. Just don't bury your talents, okay? Let us profit from them. Libraries are full of critiques of other people's writings. I think there's some copyright rules about how many consecutive paragraphs you can quote and how many total words (or percentage of words) you can quote from a book in your critique. Good thing about being a biblical scholar is that we can use King James Version verses as much we want -- so there's nothing that will hold you back on scriptural references. There's already a very in-depth critique of the Harry Potter series so far. It's called something like "Learning From: Harry Potter" or "Teaching: Harry Potter" or something like that. But nothing that gives a Christian perspective that I know about. There was a Christian critique done on Betty Eadie's new-agey Mormon-like book, "Embracing the Light" -- so I know it can be done. However, you'd certainly want to check into the copyright laws and restrictions before undertaking such a task. I'd probably query some publishing houses (with an attached sample chapter) to see if they'd be interested. Then an editor would be able to explain how something like this can be done without running into problems. Harvest House comes to mind immediately. Not sure about others -- Thomas Nelson? Chelsea? Bethany? Multnomah Press? Even secular publishers would be interested, I'm sure. A lot of Christian perspectives have been published on famous people like Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh, so something like this isn't too far-fetched. And what about "The Lord of the Rings" and "Chronicles of Narnia"? Aren't there Christian critiques on those books also? Can you imagine the market that must exist for a balanced Christian take on the Harry Potter series! Well, I better go. It's getting late. I'm very interested in hearing more from you, especially now that you mentioned something about parallels in the Bible with 1 & 2 Chronicles. By the way, I'm also a songwriter and am currently working on two projects at once. There's so much I want to learn from you! And thanks for the third allegory -- it makes me wonder how many times you've read these books and the Bible -- even what you remembered from the Left Behind movie (in an earlier post). I bet you have a photographic memory, huh? I do too, but mine works better with "images" than it does with text or audio. Talk with you later.