Saturday, January 23, 2010

Review: "Seaside Letters" by Denise Hunter

Don’t you just love it when a book keeps you up all night? I’m not usually one to stay up late reading a Christian romance; it’s not exactly the most suspenseful genre. Last night, however, I couldn’t sleep. I was too busy reading Denis Hunter’s “Seaside Letters.”

Hunter takes the age-old “pen pal” story and makes it her own with waitress Sabrina and her customer, Tucker. Sabrina suffers from a lack of confidence because her fiance broke up with her six days before their wedding. An online relationship seems like the only safe relationship. That relationship is put in jeopardy, however, when Sabrina finds out Tucker’s her man... and he wants her to help him find his secret pen pal. Little does she know that Tucker invented the relationship as a way to break down her barriers and to get to know her. Now, Sabrina must invent a way to keep Tucker from discovering the full truth, a truth from her past that could ruin both her pen pal and her real-life relationship with Tucker.

Hunter makes the classic “You’ve Got Mail” story and makes it her own with lovable characters and surprising plot twists. Above all, she touches the heart with her message that true beauty is found in the heart. Hunter’s writing, while not descriptive, is compelling. She keeps the reader in suspense to the very end, revealing tid bits of important information as she goes along.

The thing I love most about Christian romances is that there’s always a character with a history that inhibits her from having confidence and taking on a new relationship. Hunter’s “Seaside Letters” follows this formula to a “T,” using her characters to show the unending love of God. It’s a beautiful story.


I received this book to review for free from Thomas Nelson as a member of the Book Review Bloggers program. I was not compensated in any other way. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Could NAZI Germany Happen in America?

Ever wonder how a modern, sophisticated, Christian nation could birth the Nazi movement and allow themselves to be led by an Adolf Hitler? Could that ever happen here and now?
-- David Hanneke, Letters, Modesto Bee, 20 Jan. 2010

The Wiemar Republic -- Pre-NAZI Germany -- epitomized the modern, sophisticated nation, but it also epitomized the secular, post-Christian nation.  America follows dangerously close to Germany's footsteps.

Germany rejected Christianity in the mid-1800s, led by "scholars" who elevated materialist philosophy over the Bible. Declaring modern philosophy greater than Divine revelation, they believed the serpent's rhetorical question, "Yea, hath God said?" and ate the apple, planting the seeds that sprang up as the works of Marx, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Catholic and Black Liberation Theologies... and yes, today's leaders of the Democratic Party.

Hitler's personal beliefs were closer to occultism or the New Age movement. Germany's national rejection of Christianity left a hole. Hitler filled that hole by building the NAZI cult upon an abandoned religion, Arianism.

Anyone who calls pre-fascist Germany or Hitler "Christian" has a huge hole in their knowledge of history. Only America's Judeo-Christian core has hindered her descent down the path Germany followed.

America's multicultural population would never accept a racist cult like Hitler's, but we are struggling to resist accepting Nazism's secular, neo-Marxist brother, Progressivism.