Steve Shear

Confronting Religious Fanaticism Book Two Black Hearts & Hungry Bears A NOVEL Steve Shear

Confronting Religious Fanaticism (A triadic NOVELization exploring the orthodoxic ills in Western Religions) utilizes three distinct parts in which first-person accounts describe the journey of Ira Neebest from birth until he returns from the jungles of India after being kidnapped by ISIS and the Iranian Ayatollah for writing a Nobel Prize winning novel about the evils of religious orthodoxy (Ira Neebest and The First Coming). On this journey we learn about Rebecca, Ira's mother, who is constantly doing battle with guilt driving forces in her own Hasidic background (An Eye for an Eye). And we love Natalie, Ira's wife, who as a child is abandoned by her parents at a Catholic boarding school. She is raped not once but twice by a priest with a rotting black heart, putrid breath, and wandering hands and is subsequently accused of bludgeoning him to death. As an adult, she is used by the Iranians to capture Ira and winds up in a coma (Break Hearts & Hungry Bears). All of this between the covers of a mere three manuscripts!Confronting Religious Fanaticism is all about the reader seeing firsthand how religious fanaticism can affect individuals and families and it all starts with Book One: An Eye for an Eye, and Rebecca, Ira's mother. Born into Jewish orthodoxy in Jerusalem, Rebecca escapes a marriage arranged by her Hasidic father and travels to her aunt and uncle in America. Shortly after arriving, she falls in love with Leonard, a gentile, an atheist no less, and the eventual father of their son Ira who is conceived out of wedlock. All the years Ira is growing up, Rebecca is caught between the man she loves and the religious roots of her family's fanaticism led by Jerusalem's head orthodox rabbi, Rebbe Schoenfeld, the family's rabbi who claims to have the ear of God and who is the mastermind manipulator behind Rebecca's guilt in this explosive triangle overrun with secrets, suspense, and retribution.