Pettis-Lovell Independent Publishers Ltd. the parent company of Pine Flag Books has recently published a short story by a promising new author. D.E. Roberts' "J: A Short Story" is a subtle reexamination of what it means to be religious. Far too often contemporary people assume that religion by its very nature is consciously irrational. For most of the history of religion the assumption has always been the reverse. Putting aside the execution of Socrates and the forced recantation of Galileo, the finer nuances of the phenomenology of western religion have developed to make religion more consistent with common perceptions of reality rather than in opposition. Simplistic religion was the domain of simple uneducated people, not the power brokers and intelligentsia of a civilization.
