I don’t usually write book reviews for this blog. Mostly because most of the books I read are for school and thus many readers probably would not be interested. But Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress is an exception.

The protagonist in this science fiction novel is a woman named Leisha Camden. Camden, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, is a member of a growing group of individuals genetically modified before birth to require no sleep. The reasoning is that if you need no sleep, you can have more time to study and thus be much more intelligent.

Which turns out to be completely true. Leisha grows up to be one of the most powerful lawyers in the country, and other sleepless become the leaders of nearly every field.

However, this advantage soon leads to resentment by the un-genetically modified population, called sleepers. Rampant hatred of sleepless sweeps the nation, very similar to the attitude towards African Americans in the Southern States after the Civil War. Eventually, the vast majority of the sleepless escape the discrimination by emigrating to an orbital well above the Earth, called Sanctuary. (more…)

I thought that this Chuck Colson piece would be appropriate for Easter Sunday:

Just think about the situation Christ’s disciples were in after He left them. Here was a group of peasants, powerless, up against the most powerful empire in the world. Possible prison time was the very least of their worries. They knew that torture and execution could be in their future if they refused to stop preaching the name of Jesus Christ.

But they couldn’t stop.

To a man, they kept talking about Christ’s life, death, and resurrection to anyone who would listen. None of them would deny or retract their story. Eventually, just as the authorities had threatened, most of them were executed for it. But still, all of them maintained to the very end that Jesus had risen from the dead—that they had seen Him, touched Him, talked with Him.

What would inspire men to suffer and die for a belief? Only one thing—the absolute certainty that their belief was true. Who would die to protect a lie or a hoax, especially if he knew it to be a lie? You’d have to be insane. As we’ve seen from the examples I gave, most of us won’t face prison—no, never mind prison. Most of us won’t face public humiliation to defend a lie. (more…)