Bøker av Robert Crotty

The Betrayal brings together the conflicting loyalties, passions and greed of an emerging colonial America. The characters are vividly portrayed and the plot lines follow the course of developments in the infant Republic - its heroes, its villains and its enemies. All come to life in a lively recreation of the age of Benedict Arnold and his contemporaries. The year is 1777. The fighting takes place in the Hudson River Valley - Lake Champlain campaign intended to split the colonies and bring an early end to the War of Independence. The play captures a remarkable time in the nation's history, brought vividly to life in this depiction of those who paid the price to create a new nation. Robert Crotty, a gifted writer and the author of The Teacher (2014), captures the moment. The brutality of the warfare, the everyday lives of soldiers, the jealousy and bitter competition among leaders, the seeming hopelessness of a war fought by conscripts and volunteers, George Washington holed up at Valley Forge, a Congress quarrelsome and bankrupt and a set of independent colonies attempting to band together long enough to support a campaign few understood or appreciated are all in the mix. It makes for rich and dramatic storytelling. The colonials through perseverance and fighting skill would stop the English advance and end the threat. The victory opened the way for the French to enter the conflict, decisively changing the balance of power. The end result would come later at Yorktown with Lord Cornwallis' surrender, the colonials triumphant. A new nation was born. It is all brought together by a creative and skillful author in this insightful and entertaining play capturing a critical period in the birth of America.

Terrorism is the threat of the age, or so we are told, and inevitably associated with it is the word 'Islam'. The notion of the 'Muslim terrorist' has become a colloquialism in Western media. Interestingly, in all the history books about the Second World War, the phrase 'Christian fascist' is rarely seen in spite of the fact that skewed Christian theologies were used liberally by the Nazis to further their hatred. This points to a blind spot in Western understanding about the ways in which religious (and non-religious) ideology can be mutilated to serve hateful ends. We think we see it in Islam but we can't see it in ourselves. This book is dedicated to uncovering the many understandings of Islam we lack and the many misunderstandings we need to overcome.

A moving novel of a con¿icted everyman in 1950s America. The story describes the personal and professional con¿ icts of quirky members of a large second and third generation Irish clan of primarily educators. Caring relatives are supportive in dif¿cult times while contributing to the small plot twists of daily life. Written by a talented writer with a rich ear for dialogue who magically relates the experiences and perspectives of a variety of family members, speaking in their voices. Based in part on the author's experiences growing up in Somerville, Massachusetts, this is a ¿ctional work of great range and strength in which readers may ¿nd echoes of their own lives and family relationships.Robert Crotty (1937-2011) was a student of human nature as he saw it who wrote largely (though not exclusively) from a New England perspective. He received a M.F.A. in English from the Iowa Writers' Workshop during the Raymond Carver years. He also attended the graduate journalism program at the University of Missouri at Columbia. At one point he was a reporter and editor of a Maine newspaper. There were other positions: professor, dean of a college and director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine among them. As a Mainer at heart he wrote mostly from Kennebunkport where he and his family lived and later from Portsmouth, New Hampshire where he worked for a time and acted in stage plays. This novel was written in Ireland where Bob brought his family to spend a year in Greystones on the southern coast. The Irish influence is evident. This work is fiction but tinged with the realities of life in the world of greater Boston where Bob grew up.

How Roman Christianity Defeated Its Early Competitors

At the present time, when so-called Islamic radicalism, terrorism and Jihadism occupy major media space, with Islam often depicted as the main culprit, the book attempts a tour de force. It proposes that Islam is as much victim as culprit in the history that has led to the current hostility. This is because the common claims of both mainstream and radical Islam that Islam represents the high point of the Abrahamic tradition, and therefore a purification of Judaism and Christianity, have been largely ignored, misunderstood or blatantly rejected by these faiths and therefore by ¿the West¿ in general. This rejection has effectively rendered Islam as the poor cousin, if not the illegitimate sibling, of the tradition. In turn, this has created long-term resentment and hostility within Islam as well as robbed the ¿Judaeo-Christian West¿ of a rich, inter-faith understanding of the wider Abrahamic tradition. The book explores these claims through textual, historical and theological analyses, proposing that many of them stand up better to critical scrutiny than has been commonly acknowledged. It further proposes that seeing Islam in this way has potential to re-awaken its self-understanding as a leader of accord among the Abrahamic faiths, of the kind that characterized the era of Convivencia when, in medieval Spain, Islam constructed and contributed to advanced civilizations characterized by relatively harmonious co-existence between Muslims, Christians and Jews. The book focuses on the role that a more respected and self-confident Islam could play in forging enhanced inter-faith relations in a world that desperately needs them as it struggles to understand and deal with modern and particularly vicious forms of radical Islamism.