Winner of the 2012 Tuscany Prize for Novella! Jotham is a mentally challenged man-child who, like the other apostles, follows Jesus as Christ carries out his ministry and experiences death by crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Yet the other apostles the dedicated Mary, Peter, Thomas, and the rest while they care for Jotham and look out for him, don t understand why Jesus loves him so. Thomas even says, after Jesus offers a parable, I don t see why all the pots can t be strong and beautiful.
Jotham may be different, but through him, we come to see Jesus and Jotham not just with our eyes, but also with our hearts.
Meet Arthur Powers
Arthur Powers went to Brazil in 1969 as a Peace Corps Volunteer and spent most of his adult life there. From 1985 to 1992, he and his wife, Brenda, served with the Franciscans/Maryknoll as lay missioners in the Brazilian Amazon, organizing subsistence farmers in a region of violent land conflicts. They later directed relief & development projects in the drought ridden Brazilian Northeast. Currently they live in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Arthur is a permanent deacon. Arthur and Brenda have two daughters and one granddaughter, all living nearby in Raleigh. Arthur received a Fellowship in Fiction from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the 2012 Tuscany Novella Prize, the 2014 Catholic Arts & Letters Award, and numerous other writing honors. He authored The Book of Jotham (Tuscany Press, 2013 & Full Quiver Publishing, 2020), two volumes of short stories set in Brazil – A Hero for the People (Press 53, 2013) and Padre Raimundo’s Army (Wiseblood Books, 2020), and two volumes of poetry – Edgewater and Sketches/Rio de Janeiro (both Finishing Line Press, 2015 and 2019 respectively). Arthur served (2014-2016) as judge for Winning Writers’ Tom Howard short story contest; he is an advisor to Dappled Things and Wiseblood Books, and serves on the board of The Raleigh Review. This poetry & fiction have appeared in America, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Dappled Things, Hiram Poetry Review, Liguorian, Roanoke Review, Saint Anthony Messenger, Saint Katherine Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Sou’wester. Windhover, & many other magazines & anthologies.
Condemned as heretics by the Catholic Church, the 13th-century Cathars are persecuted, tortured, and finally burned alive at Montségur. But according to legend they hide their riches and relic beyond the castle walls on the eve of their demise. In the 1930s, Otto Rahn dedicates his life to recovering the long forgotten relic, and coerced by Himmler joins the SS to find the ‘Holy Grail’ for the Nazis. Exposed as both Jewish and homosexual, Rahn commits suicide. But not before he entrusts his notes to his niece. Notes that have never been found. Seeking a challenge after retiring early, businessman Steve Jackson embarks on a modern-day search for the fabled Cathar cache. With French girlfriend, Manon Lubin, they locate Rahn’s abandoned clues in the Black Forest. The notes become a key to locating a religious discovery even greater than the Dead Sea Scrolls, and unleash a 750-year old time-capsule of revenge that threatens to shake the Church of Rome to its foundations. The massacre of the Cathars and the true story of Otto Rahn are interweaved and then continued with the fictional search for the treasure and relic. Rich in historical detail, this fascinating and absorbing story, set in France and London, climaxes with a thought-provoking and controversial conclusion that brings The Heretics’ Revenge.
Meet Martin Barrett
I am a retired Mechanical Engineer living in the old gold mining town of Arrowtown, New Zealand. I have travelled extensively in France and have been to Montsegur twice to do research on the Cathars. Their story is so compelling that it demands to be told. Then when Otto Rahn became involved in the 1930s the story is truly extraordinary.
