Marc Aronson | Gaza Unsettled

February 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Marc Aronson [27:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What a timely discussion we had about Gaza and “The problem of loving Israel.” More about Marc Aronson’s new book from his website:

Marc Aronson’s mission is to inspire young people to ask questions, to look around, behind, inside of the stories the world tells us - whether that means being a detective, examining the clues history has left behind, or a reporter, telling the truth about the modern world.

A committed internationalist, Aronson has published two books that were selected as the best books in translation, and created Edge, an imprint designed to bring the voices of coming of age from around the world to American readers. It is his conviction that the mixing of genes, of ideas, of cultures, of networks of trade is the given of the world young people are entering. He is also a supporter of the Guys Read project who feels young males are often neglected by a reading world oriented towards females.

Aronson has a doctorate in American History - his focus was on William Crary Brownell, Edith Wharton’s editor, and he published conclusions as a lengthy essay in the New York Times Book Review. He periodically reviews books for the Los Angeles Times Books Review, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and publishes essays in journals devoted to reading and literature. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, the author Marina Budhos and their two sons.

The award-winning books he has written for those readers include Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado (Clarion, 2000), the first book to win the Robert F. Sibert award for the best in nonfiction; Witch-Hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials (Atheneum, 2003), a School Library Journal best book; Art Attack: A Short Cultural History of the Avant-Garde (Clarion, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book. His two books of essays for adults about teenage readers: Exploding the Myths: The Truth About Teenagers and Reading (Scarecrow, 2001), and Beyond the Pale; New Essays for a New Era (Scarecrow, 2003) have been praised as “required reading for anyone who cares about young adults and their literature” (School Library Journal).

Aronson’s book, John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell and the Land of Promise (Clarion, 2004) continues the story of colonial America he began with Ralegh, and is the first book for young readers to show how the religious passions of the early Puritans can help us to understand the viewpoint of modern Islamic fundamentalists. His trilogy concludes with The Real Revolution, The Global Story of American Independence (Clarion 2005) an account of the run-up to the American Revolution viewed in a global perspective in which Robert Clive plays as large a role as George Washington, and events in London and India are as important as those in Boston and Virginia. He is currently working on the first global history of race prejudice written for younger readers.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Religion, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

John Michael Greer | Energy Crisis

January 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with John Michael Greer [22:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Fascinating discussion with Druid Environmentalist John Michael Greer just before Obama’s inauguration. More about John Michael Greer from his website:

John Michael Greer: The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of some eighteen books, including “The Druidry Handbook” (Weiser, 2006) and “The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age” (New Society, 2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Posted by admin | Filed Under History, Science, Health, Spirituality, Religion, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, PODCAST

Lily Ratliff | Life of a Lily

January 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Lily Ratliff [12:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What a pleasure to speak to Lily Ratliff, a self-published author who has won some great awards for her inspirational memoir. More about Lily:

Lily L. Ratliff is a writer, educator, entrepreneur and speaker. Lily is the debut author of the Christian inspirational memoir, The Life of a Lily, that has been ranked consecutively for weeks on the Top 50 Black Christian News/Black Christian Book Company Independent Publishers Bestsellers List for Non-Fiction. Once being the product of the adoption system, God turned what the devil deemed as nothing into a mover and shaker that He could use for the Kingdom! Lily has taught elementary through high school English and Reading for eleven years. She has served in many ministry capacities, from singing in her local church choir, to teaching Sunday school and reading enrichment for the youth in the community. She also owns and operates “Everything That’s Lily, LLC,” an online book and inspirational jewelry business.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Spirituality, Motivation, Religion, Inspiration, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with John Michael Greer | Sound Authors Radio

January 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday January 16th and I’ve got four great guests on the show today. I’m very excited about it. Its inauguration week and I’m excited about all of the events happening this week. There’s no guests on the show talking about that specifically but I’ll certainly ask the guests what they’re thinking. I have some really varied topics on the show today, one of the authors has written a book about the Middle East, one has written about the ancient Middle East, the pyramids, but it’s my honor to welcome to the show John Michael Greer who is the author of The Long Descent. A Users Guide to the end of the Industrial Age. And there’s a beautiful front cover on the book, little men descending down the gears. So welcome to the show John Michael Greer.

John Michael Greer: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be on.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book.

John Michael Greer: Well basically do you remember back in the 1970s the last time we had an energy crisis when a lot of scientists were saying you know we’re going to have to change the way we do things pretty dramatically and then in a few decades oh we’re going to hit a wall when we get to the 21st century?

Dr. Kent: Right.

John Michael Greer: The point of my book is basically they were right and we’re in the process of hitting that wall now and we’ve got to try to figure out what we’re going to do about it.

Dr. Kent: Now you are a certified master conserver. Tell me what that is.

John Michael Greer: Okay, I don’t know if this is true out in your end of the country but a lot of states out on the west coast where I live have programs like the master gardener program, there are master composter programs, very good things put on by the local agristations or in part by state governments put on to train citizens to do very useful things. In fact during that last energy crisis there was a thing called the master conserver program and people who took part in it did classes in conservation of various kinds and then they did a certain amount of community work and they got their certificates and I’m one of the people who went through that program back in the day. So the publisher was really kind of looking around for something that would make an unofficial sounding credential and I said well try this one. Really there are no experts in this field, the field of where we’re headed as a society, where we’re headed as a culture. We all have to try to figure it out as we go along.

Dr. Kent: You are also called the Grand Arch Druid and you also have a great blog at the archdruidreport.blogspot.com but tell me about what that is.

John Michael Greer: Well there you’re basically touching on my religion. I’m a druid, I belong to the old faith of the old nature worshipping faith of the Celts or rather its modern version, recreation, redevelopment. It so happens that after various years of doing various things within the druid community in 2003 I was elected head of one of the druid orders in this country, the Integral Druids of America. Now grand arch druid sounds like an exciting title; that is ### get you a cup of coffee but it does come with an unusual looking hat which is something.

Dr. Kent: Very good. So this book itself it’s got such a gorgeous cover like I said. The long descent and here are these men just they could be women but descending these years. Talk about the general premise behind the book. A user’s guide to the end of the industrial age.

John Michael Greer: Okay, it’s a user’s guide to the end of the industrial age. One of the things that we tend to get when people start talking about the future these days is that either they think things are going to go on pretty much business as usual off for the foreseeable future. We get more and more exciting technological toys and stuff but no real dramatic changes on the one hand. Or on the other hand you have the people who are convinced that next Thursday or something like that everything is going to crash into ruin and be bombed and starving survivors roaming the landscape and anything you watched in Mad Max and so on. And nobodies talking about what life in between those two very extremes are.

That’s what was brought up in the 1970s in the various problems in the relationship we face to living outside our planet mean that we’re not going to be able to continue business as usual for very much longer. We’re already starting to have some major problems with that. But that doesn’t mean that everything’s going to fall apart in a hurry. What we’re facing instead is what I’ve called as the title suggests the long descent. A long, slow potentially fairly rough transition from the high tech industrial sort of society we have now to societies of the future that have a lot less energy and a lot less natural resources to pass around and that are basically working with a much simpler technology than we’re used to using today. So that’s the basic theme of the book.

Dr. Kent: Once you’ve hit some key words for what the pundits are talking about right now. Talk about your view of what’s happening right now in politics and society and all of that?

John Michael Greer: Well politics I think if society were a glass of beer, politics is the foam on top. Politics is froth; it’s how we argue about the changes that are going on and there are some important things going on in politics. I’m delighted; the candidate I voted for is about to be inaugurated its going to be a very historic day for this country. But the real changes that are going on, the changes that are defining what our political leaders and what we ourselves can accomplish, have to do with our relationship with the planet.

They have to do with the amount of oil that’s being produced, the amount of oil that can be produced, because we’ve actually pumped out a lot of the world’s total petroleum at this point; and various other resources. And what the petroleum geologists, what the scientists are telling us is that we’ve actually used more than half of most of our energy resources now and so we’re looking at a situation where we saw last year the price of oil went zooming through the atmosphere and then we crashed and basically its like a little bubble. When the price was going up everybody bought into it, bought oil futures zooming up at $143 a barrel, and then when it turned down everybody bailed out of it and sent it crashing down to what it is, $38. And we’re going to see more of that. More of that volatility. You won’t be able to tell from one year to the next what the price of gas is going to be. And it’s not going to be what it is today.

Dr. Kent: Now in a situation like that, we’ve got a brand new president and he promises change and I find that very exciting but you talk about in your book very clearly that the change needs to come from the bottom not the top.

John Michael Greer: Yeah, well it’s important that we have leaders who are inspiring, its important that we have people in politics who are willing to embrace the idea of change and not and I’ll trot out Dick Cheney’s line about the American way of life is non-negotiable. He’s wrong. In a sense he’s right, there’s no way we can negotiate to keep the American way of life we’ve had. It’s going to change and it’s great that we have somebody moving into the white house on Tuesday who is in tune with the need for change. But yeah, the real change has to come in our own lives. It doesn’t matter what the government does, if we’re not willing to bite the bullet and live a little more simply and a little less extravagantly than we’ve all been doing this last quarter century or so, changing the government aren’t really going to help them unless they change.

Dr. Kent: Well I have my best friend in the world has trained in organic farming and it’s a fascinating world and it’s actually creeping into somewhat of the corporate environment. What’s your take on local and organic versus whole foods or large scale organics?

John Michael Greer: Basically I mean even the corporate organic is a step in the right direction because among many other things organic farming uses less energy. Most of the pesticides, most of the various organic chemicals, those are actually made most of them from petroleum. So by cutting that out, we’re decreasing our dependence on oil. The next step of course is to move from big corporate organic farms that ship food all across the country to local farms producing local foods for families. And that’s the next step and its going to happen simply because while we’re going to see these variations drastic variations in the price of oil, and the price of gas, diesel fuel in turns, its generally going to trend upwards, just as its been trending upwards in most of the last decade.

So basically we’re in a situation where those people want to be thinking about where their food is coming from not tomorrow but ten years from now need to be looking at local organic farms. We need to see city councils and county councils making changes and there’s zoning to encourage small local farming. And also just to be people who are willing to pay that little bit more to shop locally, to support the local farmers. That’s going to do a huge amount of benefit for the future. As well as the fact that locally grown organic food is usually fresher and tastes better.

Dr. Kent: I’m curious about your background in terms of when did you get into the organic farming to thinking about all this. I know that you’ve published several books and this is sort of a new venture for you into kind of a mainstream trade crowd. Talk about that a little bit, your past.

John Michael Greer: I originally got involved with this back in the 1970s when I was a teenager. The energy crisis was a big thing and I did a lot of reading, a lot of studying in those days. When I first went to college I ended up, I lived most of the time at a little organic farm just past the campus of western Washington University in Washington. So I would be going to classes during the daytime then coming back and helping to tend the farm, getting up early to milk the goats and things like this and so it was a very perfect way of living in its own way. I mean I was living in a small cabin with wood heat and no running water but you would be surprised how pleasant that could be.

So when the 1980s came and we had Regan saying America is back and getting further backward all the time although I don’t think he ever said THAT, and everybody just covered their eyes and covered their ears and the “I cant hear you, I cant hear you” to the ecological problems or anything I just kind of kept with them but mostly was involved with my faith, the druid faith, which is also very supportive of nature and so when I got into writing much of what I was writing those days correlated to that faith and to the traditions true to that. There were people interested in reading what I had to say.

I thought it would be a complete waste of time to try to write something for the general public about this sort of thing but a few years back Richard Feinberg an excellent, excellent author wrote a book called The Party’s Over, which was a discussion on big oil and it actually sold quite well and I went wow, okay I guess its time to start talking about this. So I launched my blog the Arch Druid Report and started talking about people living out the end of the industrial age and it actually got quite a large audience. So from that the book sort of followed.

Dr. Kent: I don’t know all that much about druids. In fact, all I know about the word druid is from what I’ve read in some of the literature I read as a child. Tell me a little more about how that influences your views about the world and all of that.

John Michael Greer: Druidry is a very diverse faith. The standard joke is if you have a question ask it to three different druids and you’ll get at least five different answers. But broadly speaking druidly treats nature as sacred nature, nature is holy. We see nature as that in which we live and move and have our being and there is people in the druid community who talk about that in various different ways whether they want to talk about God or whether they want to talk about the gods and goddesses and whether they want to talk about nature as a sacred presence within themselves, its very much a nature centered religion. So for us, anything that benefits nature, anything that helps nature move in harmony and that helps us move in harmony with nature, that’s a sacred act and anything that defiles or disturbs nature is what Christians would call sin. You can see how this plays in pretty closely.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely and I can also see how it plays in well with last night George Bush gave his final escape speech and he talked about the good and evil that everyone thinks is good and evil and I find that fascinating from a man that’s viewed as sort of this Jesus figure to the religious right here and a Hitler figure to a lot of the rest of the world.

John Michael Greer: Yeah, good and evil are challenging terms and it gets very challenging when you try to pin them on a human being as if you’re playing pin the tail on the donkey. I think part of George Bush’s problem is that he was very ready to see the world as full of good guys and bad guys and nothing in between and that’s really not the way the world works. I mean everybody has some potential for good and some potential for evil and some people exercise one more than the other but we of course need to realize that we are human beings, we aren’t cardboard cutouts that wear white hats or black hats or what have you.

Dr. Kent: Now, in terms of the general, there’s also an extremism of opinion on environmental issues; if it’s global warming, the whole worlds going to die in five years or it doesn’t exist. Or with oil its either lets just use oil and drill off the coast and go here and there or lets just go completely to wind. What’s your take on where we’re going?

John Michael Greer: Well, you put your finger on a very important point, which is that this country right now is obsessed with that kind of dualistic thinking. It’s either or, all the way to one extreme or all the way to the other extreme and it’s as though here’s your choice: you can drown or you can die of thirst. Take your pick. But there’s a middle ground and the middle ground is where we need to be in terms of the future we’re facing that’s taking shape. With regard to global warming its pretty obvious to me that the people who are insisting it doesn’t exist are mostly funded by big oil companies and they’re propagandists but at the same time the people who are insisting we’re all going to be cooked in five years are simply going to the opposite extreme and trying to circulate scare stories in order to get their point of view accepted. Neither of those is productive.

We need to look among other things at what happened in the prehistoric past with global warming that happened many, many times. It’s not a new thing and so we need to get outside this sort of Hollywood catastrophe model and instead look at okay, what happens when the earths temperature changes? Because it does every ten thousand billion years you have these drastic changes in temperature; the worlds been through it before. We haven’t, not as civilized; I mean we have but we were living in caves at the time. So we can learn a lot about that instead of getting stuck on this kind of apocalypse thing. In the same way, in terms of petroleum, are we going to go off petroleum? Well, probably not while there’s petroleum still available because it is so cheap, so easy to pump out of the ground and it’s so useful.

It’s probably still going to be used. On the other hand there’s not actually that much of it left, especially in this country. America was the first country in the world to establish a petroleum industry, we were the first country to start pumping our oil reserves out and we’re further along in what petroleum geologists call depletion of the earth, you know the process of pumping ourselves dry than any other country on earth. So saying drill baby drill may make a good political slogan but it’s not a functional strategy.

Dr. Kent: So kind of in closing talking about industrial society we all learned about the industrial revolution in grade school and it stuck around with some of us and this is such an extreme little bubble that’s going on in the last 30 or 40 years where now everyone has as many cars as they want, as big a house as they want, stuff everywhere and I’m part of that. It seems to me like this is even more of an extreme industrial revolution. How do you define what we’re going through and where, is it possible for us to go towards a more organic society and things like that?

John Michael Greer: Well I think you put your finger on the right word there by calling it a bubble. Just think of the way the housing prices went nuts over a few years back, especially in places like Las Vegas and phoenix where people were buying houses. Not because they wanted to live in them, not because they thought anyone would live in them but because they thought they could sell them for twice the price in the future. We have this kind of speculism mentality, this notion of getting something for nothing and it’s really pervaded our society at this point. So we think it’s perfectly reasonable to have eight cars in the driveway.

Who cares if we drive one than seven of them at the most, there’s this idea that it doesn’t matter. What we’re in the process of learning as we move into the second great depression right now is that it does matter, is that we’ve wasted a huge amount of money, and resources, and labor and time of stuff that actually doesn’t matter that much. So can we make the transition? That’s not a question, we’re going to make the transition simply because the opportunity to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them isn’t there any more.

So the question is what can we do about it? Well we do have all this stuff and I suspect one of the big industries of the next decade or so is going to be recycling all that stuff. There’s probably useful raw materials and things in there so yes we’re going to make the transition. Is it going to be a rough road? Very likely, especially for people who have kind of built their identity around this notion that whoever dies with the most toys wins. A friend of mine has a t-shirt that says whoever dies with the most toys still dies. I think that’s an attitude we might want to cultivate.

Dr. Kent: Exactly, so what’s in your garden right now? Probably nothing much but I don’t know Oregon very well.

John Michael Greer: No right now up in Oregon we don’t have snow on the ground just at the moment, but it was below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. In terms of the garden right now, the perennial orbs are doing very nicely, our rosemary; nothing slows rosemary down. Everything else is basically a food for winter, we’ve got the very first traces of buds on the blueberry bushes and the leeks are doing fine, leeks always do fine. In fact, they need a good hard freeze before they really get tasty. Other than that, the garden is very quiet.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been such an honor speaking with John Michael Greer; he’s an organic gardener as well as a wonderful author of many books. He is the Grand Arch Druid of the AODA and his blog is at thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com and of course the book is called The Long Descent. A Users Guide to the end of the Industrial Age. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

John Michael Greer: Thank you very much for having me on it was a real pleasure.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be the author of a different kind of historical book called the Secret of the Great Pyramid: How one mans obsession led to the solution of ancient Egypt’s greatest mystery. That’s by Bob Brier and we’ll talk to him in just a minute.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Science, Spirituality, Religion, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Politics, PODCAST

Interview with Lily L. Ratliff | Sound Authors Radio

January 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! It’s the day after Christmas in the year 2008 and I’ve got four great guests on the show today. An award winning guest on the show is the author of The Duchess, which is just made into a major motion picture called The Duchess starring Kiera Knightly. It will be great to talk to her later in the show as well as a brilliant jazz musician and another author later on. My first guest on the show, her name is Lily L. Ratliff. She’s a writer, an educator and much more and she’s written a book called The Life of a Lily that has been ranked consecutively on some top charts all across the country. Welcome to the show Lily.

Lily Ratliff: Hi, how are you?

Dr. Kent: I’m great! How was your Christmas this year?

Lily Ratliff: Actually it was very nice. I was truly, truly blessed this year.

Dr. Kent: And your book is called the Life of a Lily and of course it has a double meaning. To Christians, there’s so many references to the lily and of course that’s your name. Tell us about how the concept of the book got started.

Lily Ratliff: Well actually the book was actually a diary that was written many years ago and around 2001 as I was writing about things that were going on in my life at that point, I was actually going through a traumatic divorce and also the death of my grandmother, who actually raised me as a baby. She adopted me along with my grandfather and I was going through a lot of emotional trauma at that time and I decided that I would actually just start writing a diary of all the things that was inside of me to kind of release some things. Late one night back in 2001 I was awakened and I do believe it was God Himself who told me that I needed to take this and put it into a book and that’s exactly where it kind of got started. I was writing all the way up until about 2005 and thought the book was pretty much done and another tragedy happened as well. My youngest brother was shot and killed in 2005 senselessly and I decided to go ahead and continue writing a certain chapter about his life and then finally in 2007 in December, it was published.

Dr. Kent: How is the experience been so far, it’s been a year?

Lily Ratliff: It’s been great. I have got to admit this book is not definitely for the weak at heart. I opened up about a lot of issues. It was very transparent; I’ve gotten some good and I’ve gotten some not so good. Most of the good has been that people have been delivered and set free by my testimony, but then there are others who have come to me bold-faced and said that they could never have put that kind of information within a book. But that’s the difference between myself and maybe some other people. For me it was a release. For me it was something that God ordained for me to be. It was not something that I woke up and said I would share my dirty laundry with others. So for me it was something that I knew other people would be blessed by and could really use and apply to their own life situation.

Dr. Kent: So how about there’s the old adage that says you cant judge a book by its cover, but I got to say the cover on this book is really beautiful. How did the cover design happen?

Lily Ratliff: Oh man, I had about four or five different designs that was given to me by my publisher and I really liked each and every one of them; however, this one captured me the most because the subtitle of the book is called Growing in His Strength, Blooming in His Love and it lets you know that throughout your life you have to grow in a certain way and you have to go through the motions of what God brings you in your life; the trials and the triumphs and ultimately you’ll bloom from them into what He now sees as a person He can use. And so I think that particular cover showcased that so much more and others did also because I ended up being a finalist in the 2008 Indie book awards for overall design of the book, so I’m really proud of that.

Dr. Kent: Now, in terms of the book itself, do you feel that you’ve been able to reach some people with it?

Lily Ratliff: I do, I’ve had the opportunity over the past year since you’ve asked me the question about this year, how has it been for me, I’ve been able to travel quite a bit with this book and not necessarily to do book signings but also to do quite a bit of presentations and talks in churches and women’s groups, and singles ministries with just people sometimes I get things that I don’t even ask for but I never turn an event down, because I feel the more I’m able to share, the more people will get from it and its supposed to be something to reach as many people as possible.

Dr. Kent: I also see that you’ve got a new book coming out pretty soon here, some children’s books. Are you still working on that?

Lily Ratliff: I am and in March of 2009 my first book in a series of six called The Last Shall be First is going to be coming out and its really a modern age Fat Albert so to speak but its set in a Christian school and its kids that are usually labeled as isolated individuals. People that have physical or emotional ailments; either are in foster care or single parent homes, they’re ones that kids shun, they’re ones that kids tease and never really want to call on for group games or those types of things but these kids all in all are by the end of the story have to go through some things and ultimately end up being first when bullies and others who once taunt and teased them, beat them up, finally have to call to them and they look for their help in so many different ways so this six book series is definitely going to be for our children of today because a lot of our children go through so much that we really fail to realize they know much more than we think they know. So these books are really going to cater to them.

Dr. Kent: Is that one of your main goals going forward as a writer?

Lily Ratliff: Actually I’ve been asked to do several different things. wherever God leads me; if its not just children’s books, I’ve got short stories, I’ve even been asked to do a screen play of my own life story, The Life Of A Lily. So there’s so many avenues out there that I’m really just seeking God about it and I’m just sure things are going to continue to happen for me in 2009.

Dr. Kent: I see here that I’m supposed to ask you if you’re a full time writer or if you have another profession?

Lily Ratliff: Actually I am an educator. I’ve been an educator for about 12 years now. Elementary through high school so I’ve seen all gamut’s of different children’s personalities and their needs. They do believe it or not have needs and a lot of times parents always ask well what problems can you possibly have. You don’t pay bills, you don’t have a job, this that and the other but they really go through some different issues. Like I said before that we ourselves even when we were younger have not gone through things.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little about the biography itself. Its now award winning, it’s called The Life of a Lily and it’s got a gorgeous cover. Tell me about the book itself.

Lily Ratliff: The book is really about my life as an adopted child. Even though I was still within my family and my grandparents were the ones that adopted me, I went through lots of different neglect and abandonment issues trying to vie for the attention of my mother. She lived in the very same city and around the corner from me but never really acknowledged me as her own. And I had to ask a lot of questions and a lot of those questions didn’t get answered for me until much later. The attention I tried to seek from her ended up doing nothing but turning against me when we would have confrontation after confrontation between each other and the fact that she thought what I got from my grandparents I didn’t deserve. So there was a lot of bitterness, envy, and anger on my part because I wanted to know why was I not raised with her? Why did she see me so differently and thought that I was a nobody? When yet still she did raise my younger brother and didn’t raise me. So those questions came and it felt like every single solitary relationship I had after that would be familiar to me and continued to have that neglect go from one relationship to the next and it ultimately had to be really broken. It had to help me to see me for who I really was and to reflect upon my past. But then what was I going to do to make sure my future wasn’t going to be the same as my mother that I saw on a day to day basis. So that’s where it came from. It has a lot of scripture references in it and prayers that came from my experiences.

Dr. Kent: Let me ask you, at the close of this year, of course it’s the day after Christmas and the end of 2008; do you have some hope for the future? I was a big fan of Barack Obama’s and I’m so happy he’s been elected. Do you have some hope going forward here that the children will be well taken care of and everything else?

Lily Ratliff: I do believe so, I strongly believe that this is a new age for us in so many ways shapes or forms and its not just necessarily for the black folks and blacks in general but for everybody and I think a lot of times its important for us to see that we have come a long way but we still have so much more to go. My hope of course is that we do a whole lot more for our kids. Education wise, getting them to understand what their dreams and goals are and it’s not just about being a football player, basketball player but they have so many more hopes and dreams and we see that as evident now more so with the election of Barack Obama. And I hope to continue to writing, I hope to continue speaking and doing much more in that field. I do have a business as well called Everything That’s Lily, LLC. It’s an online book and inspirational jewelry business and I’m getting ready to start affiliating with others that would like to take part and work under me in regards to my business. There’s so much out there that we need to take hold of and grasp because the time is now. We don’t have to be in a recession, there’s a lot going on but if we just pass it to the power of what God gives us on a day to basis because He says He gives us the power to create wealth and we can do that if we just get up and get moving.

Dr. Kent: Well the book is called The Life of a Lily: Growing in His Strength, Blooming in His Love. It’s written by Lily L. Ratliff and its been a real pleasure speaking with you Lily.

Lily Ratliff: Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Kent: And merry Christmas.

Lily Ratliff: Merry Christmas to you.

Dr. Kent: Well the next guest on my show is an award winning author. Her name is Amanda Foreman, her recent book called The Duchess was made into a major motion picture called the Duchess starting Kiera Knightly, Ralph Fiennes, and it was an extraordinary film. The book was originally called Georgiana but its going to be a real pleasure chatting with her on the show in a little bit after this break.

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