Daughter of God - Softcover

Perdue, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812589718 ISBN 13: 9780812589719

Publisher: Forge Books, 2001

Synopsis

The Vatican has lost its most closely held secret--irrefutable proof of a woman Messiah named Sophia. Born in the Holy Land in 310 AD, Sophia was known for performing healing miracles. Her divinity threatened early Christian dogma and she was executed as a girl by Church authorities.

In the present, Zoe Ridgeway, an art broker, visits Switzerland with her husband Seth, where she expects to purchase the estate of a German art collector. But before Zoe can complete the transaction, she and Seth are drawn into a thousand-year-old web of conspiracy, murder and intrigue that begins and ends with the mystery of Sophia--and all the powerful forces who seek to protect their patriarchies from a divinely feminine truth.

About this title

From the Publisher

"DAUGHTER OF GOD is the way thrillers are supposed to be written. The plot and concept are unlike any on the shelves today. A read you won't soon forget." --Clive Cussler

From the Author

I was born and raised in Mississippi where Jesus and football get taken equally seriously. Both religion and the Ole Miss/State game are subjects for endless conversation, agonizing, joy, recriminations, fear, loathing and debate as are the notions that women just don't have what it takes to handle either obsession.

Growing up as a Southern Presbyterian I became increasingly disenchanted as I reached adolescence. When I began to get involved with the civil rights movement in the 1960s,I quickly saw how religion - not just in The South but globally - had become a handy instrument of social control, with scriptures and holy books carefully distorted and sorted through to find those that justified racial and sexual oppression and a religious chauvinism that excluded other faiths as righteous.

My civil rights activities quickly alienated me - a white teenager - from most of my friends. But I quickly had another set of cohorts - mostly black or Jewish - whose backgrounds and culture were at first foreign and in the end, liberating and enlightening.

I developed a deep curiosity about religion that fed voraciously on college courses in religion and philosophy. I grew to understand that like corporations, governments and other institutions, churches develop their own bureaucracies, self-sustaining momentum and a hunger for power that make them act in their own self interest and cause them to lose sight of their primary focus: ministering to the spiritual well-being of their congregations.

From this, it was easy to see that the religious strife in the world is not a battle among believers, but instead are conflicts fueled by the bureaucratic, political and cultural ambitions of church and political leaders hell-bent on pushing their own personal agendas of power and glory. They are blindly unashamed to commit the ultimate blasphemy: that of using God to further their own ambition.

Church leaders and their political allies have lied, killed, maimed, mutilated, coerced, threatened and waged holy wars to consolidate their power. They have twisted scriptures and rewritten history to make their points. And all of them have disenfranchised women despite the fact that people have view God as a woman for far longer in human history than it has seen God as a man.

Indeed, the all-powerful Creator of the universe and all within it is far too infinite to be either male or female and seeing God only as a man is, itself, idolatrous and blasphemous.

Daughter of God is my way of looking at all this. I have written it as a thriller because that is the most fun this writer can have at a keyboard. I hope my deep abiding love for the subject comes through for every reader.

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0812589718
• ISBN 13: 9780812589719
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 422