"Peter Peacock Passes" proves the commonly held perception that for Preachers the pursuit of God and Sex are twin obsessions. Master story teller James Baker has captured with the most vivid prose the pitfalls and pratfalls of a young Texan who feels equally the desire to fulfill his Divine Vocation and his Natural Urge to find a mate. In his quest Petie Peacock struggles to survive the seductions of a college beauty queen, a delectable farmer's daughter, a high school cheerleader with Italianate mammary endowments, and a strange pair of twins named Golda and Silvia before at last he finds his Mary Sontag. He participates in the annihilation of a Homecoming float, pranks that result in blood, and the destruction of a prominent Baptist minister when pornographic pictures end up in his slide show of the Holy Land. He is humiliated in Indiana, abandoned in Chicago, and deluged in Texas before he discovers in his tumescence a way to face this brave new world. Share the fun.

Peter Peacock Passes

Literature & Fiction

Baker, Dr. James T

Genre Fiction

Green Hills Press, Incorporated

Faith for a dark Saturday

"The darkest hour is just before dawn." The age-old adage has been borne out through the experiences of countless lives as a true statement. In Faith for a Dark Saturday, the noted theologian and historian James Baker shows how nine men from the Bible prove the point. Each man tells, in his own words, the misery of his darkest hour, a time that he did not know but we do was just before the dawning of a morning of hope. There is Abraham as he prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. Jacob as he prepared to meet his hostile brother and possible death. Moses in desert exile before he sees the burning bush and receives the commission of his life. King Hezekiah as he awaits assault from the invincible Assyrian army. Joseph as he contemplates the scandal caused by his finance's pregnancy. The apostle Peter on the Saturday between the crucifixion and resurrection. Paul as he prepares to leave for Damascus to round up Christians. The jailer of Philippi before the earthquake that will bring his salvation. John in exile on Patmos before his vision. Everyone, sometimes in his life, experiences a dark Saturday of despair like the Saturday between the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. You will be inspired to lean on your own faith as you share the experiences of these men, caught in fear and despair, during the agony of their dark Saturdays, just before the dawn of a new day of hope. In Faith for a Dark Saturday, Dr. Baker imaginatively tells the stories of persons in the Bible who experienced severe testing of their faith and reached the darkest hour of despair.

Faith for a Dark Saturday

Religion & Spirituality

Kannard, Brian

New Age & Spirituality

White Dogs is the story of a young woman and the six men who know her in six different ways.  It is the story of how the way men see women affects both men and women.  Master story teller James Baker has created an astounding commentary on the human condition, discovering universal truths in a few grains of sand along the side of a rural road.  Mary Charlotte Lafferty's life is molded by these six men: her father, whose  suicide leaves her to grow up with a brother; her brother whose innocence involves the two in the world's oldest taboo; the boy preacher who falls in love with her and loses his innocence as he learns the truth and strips her of her own innocence; the Mexican who helps her escape her prison and by worshiping her destroys himself; the man who uses his wealth to make claims on her that result in the deaths of two men; and the boy who starts out to kill her and what she means to him and ends up loving her as none of the others did or could do.  This book could just be a sleeping masterpiece.

White Dogs

Baker, James T.

Women's Fiction

The story of Toussaint Louverture and the tragic nation of Haiti that he founded has never been told with such power and imagination as respected historian and master story teller James Baker does in his novel "Sex and Bondage in Three Colors". In this revolutionary book he has created a new literary genre, one critics have called "historical fantasy." History limits itself to known facts. Historical fiction limits itself to creating scenes and dialogue only in places where facts are not known and only if the created scenes and dialogue do not violate known facts. Baker's historical fantasy tells a story of historical figures without limits, setting his fantasy free to soar. This novel ranges over the interconnected lives of such men as Toussaint, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Thomas Jefferson and demonstrates how their distinct and often conflicting visions of the future collide. He describes in delicious detail the sexual exploits, many of them with disastrous results, of white, black, and brown men who break free of their bonds only to be shackled by their desires. There is rape, incest, miscegenation, and unbridled lust as a host of men and women conceive and give birth to our cruel modern world.

Sex and Bondage in Three Colors

Erotica

Francis Martin, Ph.D. drew on his experiences as a mental health counselor, health care administrator, and a volunteer at Nashville's Alive Hospice in writing Hospice Mementos. The text offers firm and solid inspiration to those who serve hospice patients and their families. The message to them is, "Thank you for your loyalty and service to someone who is important to you." Hospice Mementos hopes to contribute to the well-being of all of you who serve home care and hospice patients and their families. Nurses, volunteers, home health aides, chaplains, social workers, physicians, administrators, support staff, and various therapists who care for patients will all draw strength from Dr. Martin's observations.

Hospice Mementos: A Salutation to Dawn

Martin Ph.D., Francis A

Parenting & Relationships

If you are addicted to alcohol or drugs, you already know what it’s like to live in a way that dishonors life and that causes pain. If you have dishonored life through living as an addict, you know more than anyone else how very much you miss living a full life. You know how you have misled yourself. You know how many persons you have hurt and possibly driven away from you. You know how little joy you have. You know how empty your soul is, leaving you feeling distant from God. You know how remote from life you feel. You know the emptiness of many of your relationships. You know how much money and time you have lost from your life. You know all of this and much more if you are an addict. At the heart of Full Life: A Workbook for Spiritual Recovery from Addictions is a method of living honestly, as a flawed human being. Francis A. Martin Ph.D. has drawn from his years of experience as a professor, mental health counselor, academic administrator, health care administrator, and a volunteer in mental health and medical agencies to create Full Life: A Workbook for Spiritual Recovery from Addictions. The text is more than a simple workbook for a spiritual-based recovery from addictions. Using the classic 12 step model, Dr. Martin’s method is based on a 12 hour clock system. No matter what hour of the day or night, you can turn to the appropriate hour and find unique prayers and exercises to bolster any 12 step program you are following. What is the theory behind Full Life: A Workbook for Spiritual Recovery from Addictions? A full life means that you grow and change. If you grow and change, you become someone who is likely to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday, but it also means that living in the here-and-now is more and more possible. If you grow and change, you become a better friend to yourself. Strangely, this means that as you change, you gain an ability to manage your life. Instead of linking the parts of your life with episodes of using your addictive substance, you become free to select the better parts of your life and to cherish them. Isn’t it time to start living a full life today?

Full Life: A Workbook for the Spiritual Recovery of Addictions

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

Father Columba rides again! This time he is on leave from his abbey in Pennsylvania to do a retreat on the Holy Isle of Iona, just off the west coast of Scotland. It is the tiny dot in the ocean where his namesake, Saint Columba, took refuge and built an abbey over a millennium and a half ago. While there, the new Columba is called upon to solve a murder mystery and unknowingly follows in the footsteps of his predecessor, who had to solve a similar mystery in the distant but not so misty past. At the turn of this millennium, in 2001, author James Baker discovered a journal in the archives of Columba’s abbey in Pennsylvania which detailed Columba’s dithering attempt to solve a murder in a priory in Mississippi. That account is now the book Prior Knowledge. Five years later he discovered a second journal, which comprises half of Good for the Soul, in the Vatican Library in Rome. He learned the story of the first Columba from an Irish priest studying at Rome’s Angelicum Institute. Seeing the striking similarities in the two stories, he combined them for this book. The priest hinted several times that he knew about another of Columba’s journals concerning a murder in Rome, but Baker has not been able to track it down. Still another journal, the story of a murder in Korea which Columba helped solve and which he mentioned in the “Good for the Soul” journal, is missing. It is possible that Columba destroyed it because it was dangerous. Only last year Baker’s collaborator Cheryl Greer Reels found another of Columba’s journals in Nashville’s Convent of St. Mary Magdalene. This journal will eventually be published in book form. Look for it.

Good for the Soul

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Thomas Merton, known in religion as Father Louis, was born in France, in his words "under the sign of the waterbearer," in 1915. He studied at Cambridge in England and at Columbia in New York. As a student he lived what his friends have described as a bawdy life but turned from it to become a devout Roman Catholic. As America entered World War II he entered the abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and for 27 years he was a Trappist monk, in the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. During his early days there he wrote an autobiography which became the third bestselling nonfiction book of the year 1949 and went on to write more than 50 more until in 1968 he at last went back into the world to meet with monastic leaders in Asia. Apparently Pope Francis read Metron's works and in his address to the U.S. Congress named Merton, Dorothy Day, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. as people he hoped Americans would emulate. He had entered Gethsemani on December 10, 1941, when he was nearing his twenty-seventh birthday; and on December 10, 1968, as he was nearing his fifty-fourth birthday, he was accidentally electrocuted while attending a religious conference in Bangkok, Thailand. Many in the West consider him a saint and many in the East consider him a manifestation of the Buddha. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has been compared to the Confessions of Saint Augustine No one who reads it or any other of his books is ever the same again. The author of this play, James Thomas Baker, knew Thomas Merton and wrote the original version of the play soon after Merton's death. This completely revised and rewritten version, done as an expression of love and admiration in 2015, is to commemorate his hundred birthday.

Under the Sign of the Waterbearer

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Once more Father Columba takes up his pen to record another of his adventures-although he sometimes thinks of them as misadventures. Once again he feuds with God, meets wonderfully colorful characters, and bumbles his way to the solution of a riddle. This time he has been ordered by his Father Superior to answer a request from Melk Abbey near Vienna Austria to help the Abbot there locate one of his monks, who has mysteriously disappeared. Father Columba, who has been compared to G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, does not consider himself a sleuth, but he does abide by his Vow of Obedience and heads off to the Center of European Music to do what he can to help his fellow Benedictines. There he delves into the disappearance of the Monastic Brother and uncovers a love story unlike any he has ever encountered. On the other hand, on a free day he visits the tragic, romantic hunting lodge of Mayerling, and he realizes that the story he is pursuing is neither new nor unique. You are in for a real treat as you read this memoir by a monk who thought at the age of 65 he was retiring only to be called to a new Holy Vocation: solving mysteries involving his fellow Catholics great and small. Columba titles this story "The Third Monk" in reference to the famous novel and film "The Third Man," which was set in Vienna just after the Second World War. His title may not be original, but Father Columba himself certainly is. If you fall in love with this elderly Sherlock Holmes and are intrigued by his Viennese adventure, you will want to read his other adventures: set in Oxford Mississippi, Seoul South Korea, the Isle of Iona, The Eternal City of Rome, and the Capital of Country Music Nashville Tennessee.

The Third Monk

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