A Love Forbidden

Three Paths to a Decent Life: Dismantling the teaching of St. Paul Sequel to Jesus for a Secular Age?

The Christian New Testament is dominated by two men, Jesus and Paul. Take away the four gospels and the letters of Paul and it is surprising how little of real significance is left.

Following Leslie Scrase’s recent book on the relevance of Jesus for a secular age, he felt he had to continue and take a closer look at Paul.

More than any other person, Paul was responsible for turning a small Jewish sect into an organisation holding the capacity to become a world religion. His dynamic, driven, self-assured character, combined with his organisational skills, put together with his determination that the new religion was for all mankind and not just for Jews, led to the early spread and success of the new religion.

Without Paul it is more than possible there would be no Christian churches and no Christian religion today.

ISBN: 9781852002145

Size: 217x135mm 

Binding: paperback 

Length: 83pp

Jesus for a Secular Age? A close look at whether the stories of Jesus have anything to offer us today.

Brought up within a Christian family and attending a boarding school with a very narrow Bible-based Christian heritage, it took Leslie Scrase until his forties to break free. Now with many grandchildren who have no religious beliefs at all, he has found himself looking at the biblical gospel stories again and asking whether Jesus has any relevance at all in this increasingly irreligious and secular age.

ISBN: 9781852002114

Size: 217x135mm 

Binding: paperback 

Length: 83pp

Originally published in 1987, Mildred has now been updated and revised in this new edition. The author explains within this book her belief that it was due to the fateful gullibility and cupidity of our foremother Eve in Eden, and the incogitant and spineless act of rebellion by Adam, whom she believes to have been Eve’s brother, that our devoted Creator actually sent his Daughter, not his son, to redeem us from the devil with Her streams of peerless blood. 

Using evidence from many eminent writers as well as the Bible itself, the author offers readers the proof that rather than the adverse reaction to the inclusion of females within Church dominions that has been so prevalent in the past, they should actually accept and rejoice in the fact that the Saviour Herself was female. 

The justification leading to Mildred being the Saviour, crucified whilst in the final throes of childbirth, is rooted in Leviticus 4:32, the content of which was introduced to the author at a dame-school in the 1930s. Since that time she has spent many years researching and extolling the virtue of our Saviour being a female, often against considerable enmity. Now, in the first half of the 21st century, she believes that at last minds are opening up to the amazing discovery she herself made so many years ago, that it is to a female, not a male, of the species that the Church should be displaying its veneration. 

ISBN: 9781852001872

Binding: Hardback

Size: 217x140mm 

Length: 100pp

This is an unusual novel about one man’s discovery of the philosophy of existence. 

The late 1950s and early 60s is a time of rapid change in society in general, but for Jack Smith, brought up within a privileged background by preoccupied parents, early life consists of books and his own contented company. However, this changes on his arrival at boarding school, where he meets a good friend called Ron, with whom he can share his young ideas about ideology, mankind and the other eternal questions of life. 

Jack’s life remains quietly inward during his early working career, but good fortune and happenstance lead to his marriage, and from this he discovers that he has an unexpected ability to be successful in business. 

Now more confident in character and having a settled lifestyle, Jack joins his childhood friend Ron when on holiday in Ebstowe and is introduced to a remarkable old man named Enoch Flint. Flint’s curious philosophy of life, knowledge about metaphysics and odd disassociation with the mundane world around him, rekindles Jack’s own interest in the question of mortality and all the philosophical texts he had studied earlier in his life. 

It is when Jack loses his father and becomes depressed about life that he feels strongly drawn to return to Ebstowe, and this leads to the amazing revelation that there was something genuinely unusual about Enoch Flint and his life-changing concepts of time and space.

ISBN: 9781852001667 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: Hardback 

Length: 120pp

A compelling story based on the actual lives of a family living through the dying days of British Colonial rule in what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, utilising extracts from the diary of Charles Barlow.

In 1945 Charles 'Chas' Barlow is a man in his 80s, with 3000 acres of farmland at Lemera, where he lives with his wife Beth who has a child called Rick from a previous marriage. As a stepson Rick is a burden to Chas, constantly owing money and not pulling his weight when employed.

With the birth of Rick's own first son, also named Charles, his wife Helene suffers serious postnatal depression and the elderly Chas and Beth find they are left to look after the new infant. Chas, in particular, becomes a real grandfather and mentor to the boy and this is later repeated with a second child named Jamie.

This real story of the two boys' upbringing, largely undertaken through the caring and indomitable spirit of Chas, together with the problems surrounding their parents, and those of running such a large farm, reflects strongly the historical background of the era, with all their lives so different to those in England at that time.

Gabriel Ellison has carefully woven a moving account which records the lives of Chas and Beth, and their close friends and grandchildren, using archival material from the period, with the book beginning and ending with poignant memories by their grandchild Jamie.

ISBN: 9781852001643 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 262pp

Philip Maynard is a young Englishman who, following the post-war failure of his first marriage, has travelled to South Africa to take up a position as mathematics master in a government school. In Johannesburg he meets Marnie van Vollenhoven, a beautiful Capetonian, and falls deeply in love with her. Marnie, however, is evasive. Philip's relationship with her is one of unfulfilled longing and eventual despair.

For the sake of his career and in a test of Marnie's love, Philip returns to England where he takes up an appointment as headmaster of Wharfedale College, a private school in the Yorkshire Dales. Here he meets and marries Edith Armitage, knowing that all he can give her is a second-best relationship, because his love remains in Africa.

Edith proves to be a capable and popular headmaster's wife and the marriage companionship succeeds, with the couple settling into a very English way of life. But as time passes, Edith's poor health lead the pair to Africa, where Philip is once again to meet Marnie.

Eventually Philip is to discover the reason for Marnie's seemingly inexplicable behaviour towards him, as well as the significance of a surprise encounter with a young woman in a Boland village of the Cape.

ISBN: 9781852001629 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 203pp

In the late 1930s, at the age of just 16, Julia Hayes knows she wants nothing more than to work on the family’s small hilltop farm in Yorkshire: her idea of heaven.

Although fully aware  of the struggle farming had been to her parents, with her father Ernest already older than his years and her mother Margery subject to heart trouble, she will not be deterred, and with her brother Nick has ideas for making Hayes’ Farm an efficient and profitable business.

However the daunting threat of losing everything due to rent arrears, kept secret by Julia’s father, results in an old flame of her mother’s helping out, and Nick being lured away from farming by business opportunities and romance.

As one crisis leads to another Julia is left to struggle on her own: determined to hold on to Hayes’ Farm despite all the anguish and stress. With the outbreak of war her problems escalate, and she is left with heartache following a brief romantic encounter. But Julia becomes bound into that moment of romance and the outcome is beyond anything she could possibly have imagined.

Compelling to the end, this is the story of a woman’s indomitable ability to overcome all life’s conflicts for the promise of her own piece of heaven on earth.

ISBN: 9781852001438 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 216pp

Coping with Death: A Book for the Bereaved and Those Who Try to Help Them

In this short book author Leslie Scrase helps to uncover and explain those emotions felt when having to deal with death, something we will all be involved with during various parts of our lives but which is often so very difficult to contemplate or discuss.

After many years of conducting Humanist ceremonies the author has gained a great deal of sympathetic knowledge and understanding about bereavement and how to cope with it.

Starting with the funeral ceremony itself, the book goes on to discuss the problems of coping with untimely death, surviving and progressing after bereavement, whether there is life after death, and dealing with the anger or guilt which death can induce.

At the end of the book there are a good number of passages and poems to help stimulate or bring comfort to readers, many of which could also be particularly useful to anyone looking for something suitable to quote within a memorial ceremony.

ISBN: 9781852002053 

Size: 217x135mm 

Binding: paperback 

Length: 93pp

It's a Jungle in There! Obsessions, Compulsions, Addictions and Other Such Swamps of the Mind

Sometimes it is the very simplicity of the tale which makes the reading worthwhile, and this is such a case.

Jean Cooper's Mam, Violet May Coulton, lived to be 100 years of age and the story spanning those years from 1905 to 2006 is told here via memories and photographs. She was one of seven children and the challenges she faced, along with so many women of her generation, would seem extraordinary to most younger women in Britain today. Life was often hard and cruel, with true poverty and little love.

At the age of twelve Violet went to work during the First World War. Then followed several different jobs including being a scullery maid at Egerton Lodge, Melton Mowbray, where very many years later she would return as an esteemed guest, finally able to see what was upstairs! This in itself shows how considerably times changed during one lifetime. Nevertheless, all those years of poverty and hard work at a young age, then the Depression and no work and living through two world wars, never truly dampened the spirit of this indomitable woman.

The stories remembered in this book by the author and her two sisters, Audrey and Nancy, reflect the history of one life which itself reflects the history of Britain over those hundred years, and they will be an inspiration to all who read them.

ISBN: 9781852001179 

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 233pp

Torn between his vocation as a priest and his love for a woman, Father Tony Quinn’s decision to leave the priesthood and marry Eileen - a divorced Catholic mother of four children - followed many months of heart-searching, clandestine meetings and immense pressures. At times, the echoed words, “I don’t think I could ever leave the priesthood!” extinguished all hope of a future together.

Although mainly narrated by Eileen, Tony tells of his own childhood in Ireland, his college days in Dublin, his ordination and his time as a priest in Bacup, Lancashire, where the couple were to meet.

Following the break-up of her marriage in 1975, Eileen and her children went to live at her parent’s home in Bacup. A mutual love of music brought her together with Father Quinn, she playing the guitar and he the mandolin. It was under the guise of a musical partnership that a relationship developed, beginning one evening in the wake of a violent thunderstorm, recorded as the ‘town’s worst in living memory’.

The book chronicles a growing relationship between two people in a love great enough to surmount the ‘system’ which is against them. The separations, Father Quinn’s popularity as a priest, Eileen’s family and her life in a council house living on social security, are all written about with great honesty.

Their eventual marriage inevitably caused much controversy and it was well publicised throughout the media. They now have two children of their own and today Tony runs his own accountancy business in Bacup, the town where he was once acclaimed one of the most popular priests to have served.

ISBN: 9781852000820

Size: 217x140mm 

Binding: hardback 

Length: 215pp