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@claire-h Solid points all. Plus, if you can make a non-murder mystery compelling, that itself will set it apart from the majority of the genre. In your excerpt, the mention of her grandfather’s technical work immediately elicited expectations of some speculative machine / 1920s gaslight / dieselpunk technology. It may be something far more mundane than all that, but your setting, time period, and serious and detailed tone all set the stage for either a mystery or cosmic horror / weird fiction.

My contention is that the OT was still authored by human hands through God’s divine revelation – while our work isn’t divine revelation, I think in prayer we can trust God to reveal what we ought not to say if we really ought not to say it. But your mention of Phillipians is still a good reminder that the purpose of our work is ultimately to enlighten and uplift, not burden or corrupt.

Regarding communion – well, Paul in the NT places a great weight on communion as our celebration of the last supper and our ritual reunion with each other and with Christ – so much as to warn his readers that to take communion with impropriety is to invite wrath and even death (1 Corinthians 11:27-32). It is likely from these verses (and many more besides) that Hus and his followers drew the conclusion that communion must be celebrated in both kinds – bread and the wine, not one without the other. So from a historical standpoint, it’s vitally important that I focus on the doctrinal conflict which ignited the entire war.

But from a literary and theological standpoint – communion is a powerful symbol of our dependence on Christ and the vital nature of the church and her fellowship of brothers and sisters. The real meal of communion is not the little dry cracker and the small cup of juice or wine, but the flesh broken for our transgression and blood poured out to wash away our sins. For years I never really grasped the significance of the ritual, not even once I understood it with my head. If we see it merely as bread and wine, we see only a quaint little ritual. But if we see instead the broken body of Christ and his blood running down, we come a little closer to understanding the eternality, the perpetuality of Christ’s forgiveness for our sins – we come to see a little better just how much Christ has done for us, what he continues to do for us, and the utter magnanimity of our Father God – that only a Father God could be so lovingly patient with such a difficult, stubborn, and willful people. A lord might eventually tire of his subjects’ rebelliousness, but a good Father will never cast out His children.

So, yeah – packing that into a novel might be a bit hard. 😛 I don’t know if I’m writing specifically for a Christian audience, but I suspect with all the theology I’m getting into I might well be. Nonetheless I’d like secular readers to be able to follow as well – and perhaps glean why communion is so important to Christians (or should be!) and why people were willing to stand up to an empire in defense of the ritual.

Well, if your brother ever gets tired of you running ideas by him, you always have a back-up here!