Announcing a New Blog Series for 2017...
Surely a good story should be retold. Yet in the retelling of any engaging tale the opportunity to gain new insight or knowledge is often lost. It is with the latter—new insights and knowledge—that Apostles & Pioneers has been devised. This 12-segment series will blend aspects of the 12 disciples of Jesus of Nazareth with 12 oft-overlooked discoverers who had a major impact on permanent settlement of the New World, especially North American settlement. While perhaps a seemingly odd way to highlight lesser known personages associated with European settlement of the Americas or as a way to introduce (or reintroduce) those who followed Jesus, especially the years after Jesus’ crucifixion, I wanted to move beyond the somewhat more traditional short biographical blurbs that are currently prevalent in print media to more lively sketches in order to provide greater context of the 24 individuals highlighted in this series.
Therefore, Apostles & Pioneers strives to present underpinning commonalities and cross-currents that these 24 men represented to their peers and to those of us today: devotion and discovery; faith and fearlessness; imagination and innovation; potentiality and plain truth; marvel and mettle. Thus if Apostles & Pioneers is able to provide the spores of good, new stories here in one, several, or all of the 12 segments of the series, I will have achieved my intended goal when envisaging this more unique series.
Just as each of the 12 segments in the series concludes with a haiku (why not blend some East with West; Orient with Occident since I am already somewhat stretching logical bounds in this series anyway, right?), I present the following as a fitting close to this introduction and overview to the series:
To the Apostles and Pioneers of Yore:
Lost are ye no more!
Life’s lessons leavened anew.
Direction from ye!