MSI Press Blog

  With all the serious stuff in everyone's lives these days -- economy, covid, elections --it seemed that Friday the 13th needed a little levity. So herewith is a blog post from The 100th Lamb, a blog maintained by Elizabeth Mahlou (MSI Press author of Blessed Atheist and A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God ). Although Elizabeth no longer maintains the blog, the posts are still available. May it bring a smile to you this evening. A kindergarten teacher was helping one of her students put his boots on. He had asked for help and she could see why. With her pulling and him pushing, the boots still didn’t want to go on. When the second boot was on, she was nearly out of breath. She almost whimpered when the little boy said, “Teacher, they’re on the wrong feet.” She looked and sure enough, they were. It wasn’t any easier pulling the boots off than it was putting them on. She managed to keep her cool as they worked together to get the boots back on – this time on the r

  Blest Atheist is the perfect book story to tell on Easter. After all, it opens and ends with an Easter scene. The story behind the book is actually told within the pages of the book. Dr. Mahlou sspent her life as an atheist; Blest Atheist is the story of that life and of her conversion to Catholicism.  Here is the book description: As a young child, outraged by the hypocrisy she finds in a church that does nothing to alleviate the physical and sexual abuse she experiences on a regular basis, Beth delivers an accusatory youth sermon and gets her family expelled from the church. Having locked the door on God, Beth goes on to raise a family of seven children, learn 17 languages, and enjoy a career that takes her to NASA, Washington, and 24 countries. All the time, however, God keeps knocking at the door, protecting and blessing her, which she realizes only decades later. Ultimately, Beth finds God in a very simple yet most unusual way. A very human story, Blest Atheist encompasses the

  Dr. Elizabeth Mahlou, author of Blest Atheist , her conversion story (abbreviated here ), says she had two goals in the writing of this book. One, perhaps obvious, to any reader was to continue her conversion story after the immediate first weeks. The second, not obvious to any reader not in her personal circle, was the telling of a true story of evil, one that greatly disturbed her and some of her closest friends and one that was played out on a deeply spiritual level that is seldom discussed because many, if not most, people do not encounter such things, or if they do, do not recognize the spiritual warfare going on.  Elizabeth changed all the names and other details, such as location, professions, and organizations involved in this spiritual battle, which forms the hidden core and major prompt for this book--something the casual reader, or even perhaps the more intuitive reader, would notice. For those involved in the warfare, however, it did not matter that names were changed. Th

  Today's fortune cookie is associated with A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God   (Mahlou). For more posts about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books, click HERE . Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter Follow MSI Press on  Twitter ,  Face Book , and  Instagram .   Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC? Check out information on  how to submit a proposal . Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book  in exchange for  reviewing  a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com. Want an  author-signed copy  of this book? Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25) and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com.  Want to communicate with one of our authors? You can! Find their contact information on our  Authors' Pages .    

Today's fortune cookie comes from Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou. See more posts by and about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books HERE . Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter Follow MSI Press on  Twitter ,  Face Book , and  Instagram .   Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC? Check out information on  how to submit a proposal . Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book  in exchange for  reviewing  a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com. Want an  author-signed copy  of this book? Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25) and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com.  Want to communicate with one of our authors? You can! Find their contact information on our  Authors' Pages .    

“Khristos voskres” (Christ is risen). One person after another greeted me with these words as I climbed the stairs of the little, wooden church in Akademgorodok, a tiny town at the end of the man-made Ob Sea, bejeweling the Siberian steppe 45 minutes south of the city of Novosibirsk . The intertwining snow-covered birch and kedr (Siberian pine) trees created an illusion of a land of fantasy, made more so in the late evenings by the moon reflecting off the naked silver-white birch bark onto the dark red-brown trunks and evergreen branches of the pines. This was not yet the taiga ; it was somewhat south for that, but nonetheless the birch and kedry stood closely side-by-side like brothers-in-arms against a hostile white and cold universe.             “V istinu voskres” (Truly, He is risen). If my words of response rang hollow, there was a reason. They came from the lips of a bona fide atheist, convinced that religious congregations were at least in part delusional. Certain

  Today's back story is about the book, It Only Hurts When I Can't Run  by Gewanda Parker. From the publisher: When Gewanda approached us with her pre-publication manuscript, it was clear that here was a person who had experienced tremendous trauma as a child. That is a story, of course. A sad story. However, what was also clear was her resilience in overcoming that trauma very, very successfully. That was a story worth publishing. An uplifting story. A story that can help others. More important for us as publisher, it fit into a line of such books, the leaders of which were Elizabeth Mahlou's Blest Atheist and Geri Henderson's and Seanne Emerton's Healing from Incest -- and ultimate prompted the commissioned book by Joanna Romer, Recovering from Domestic Abuse, Stalking, and Abuse . When it was released, Gewanda's book quickly flew to the top of Amazon's hot new releases lists: #4 Hot New Releases in the child abuse category #8 Hot New Releases in the fam

The human ability to err comes through in American Ninja Warrior that I have watched. No missteps or a fixed error result in a run to glory. One simple misstep, and even the greatest warrior can fall from glory. Last night, Isaac Caldierno, one of only two ninjas to finish Stage Four at Mount Midoriyama, fell on one of the early obstacles in the Indiana city competition. Had he lost his touch? No. Had his muscles atrophied? No. Did his strategic thinking skills fail to keep up with the ever-evolving courses? No. Had he miscalculated the obstacle? No. Did he feel sick, confused, or distracted? No. He simply took a misstep—as we all do from time to time throughout life, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. In other words, he is human. When Kacy Catanzaro made her way through tall poles rising from water, situated farther apart from each other than Casey could possibly reach, she did a quick calculation and jumped, managing to grab and hang on to the next pole. The c

  Today's fortune cookie comes from Understanding the People around You by Ekaterina Filatova. See more posts by and about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books  HERE . Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter Follow MSI Press on  Twitter ,  Face Book , and  Instagram .   Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC? Check out information on  how to submit a proposal . Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book  in exchange for  reviewing  a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com. Want an  author-signed copy  of this book? Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25) and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com.  Want to communicate with one of our authors? You can! Find their contact information on our  Authors' Pages .    

Today's book excerpt comes from Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou. Mercy   The Samaritan stopped because he was filled with mercy. He also had clearly been blessed with the resources to help. I stopped by habit. Very early I internalized the concept that helping even one person toward a better life is a way to justify one’s own existence. That may well have given a positive balance to the daily abuse I experienced throughout my childhood. Knowing that someone was better off because of something I had done—whether it was teaching a kindergarten class when I was in first grade, working as the teachers’ helper in conducting an extra reading group for the struggling readers in my elementary school classroom, or serving as an evening telephone resource to the eighth-grade members of my advanced mathematics class whose teacher kept confusing us with high school juniors—established a sense of self-worth that logically should never have appeared, given all the abuse I experienced