A Novel by Dr. Britt Minshall
Travel with Britt to the mysterious island of Haiti. Meet with others at a brothel of teenage girls, gather each evening on the hotel dining porch, overlooking an ancient jungle garden, as each group's daily saga is revealed. We traveled with these sojourners each day to mountain villages, remote forest orphanages and to clandestine meetings seeking to destroy a nation.
While not a religious work, God is very present as even the most religious fall to this mysterious land in lusting encounters with deep erotica, with seething violence in the raw.
Who Am I and What Am I Up to?
I am, in police language a WMA (White – Male – American), sixty years of age, most people take me for forty-eight (better that than eighty-two). I am divorced and the father of four grown children, three grand children and a great-grand child.
My first career, spanning sixteen years, was in Law Enforcement, ending as a Security Agency Operator (GASA - NJ State Police number 1279). During that period I served as an advisor for President Carter on the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, as a Deputy U.S. Marshall and as an Agent for INTERPOL, the International Police Agency.
Throughout my younger years I was an avowed atheist. Ignorant of the fact that people misuse religion, I blamed God for the plight of African Americans. I was a freedom rider and civil rights demonstrator. On March 11, 1975 I became a Christian. In an effort to change the way the world works I began my trek to Ordained Ministry, figuring “If the church has the power to foul the world it has the power to fix the world.”
My first degree, an Associate of Divinity, came from Southeastern Baptist Seminary. A Bachelor of Arts followed from the University of North Florida, a Master’s in Counseling Psychology from Emory University and my Doctorate in Socio-Psychology (Group Dynamics and Inter-Personal Relations) was earned in 1992 from Boston University. Talk about blessed, when I “got out” of H.S. (1962) I couldn’t even read.
The research for my doctoral dissertation became the foundation for my first book Renaissance or Ruin, The Final Saga of a Once Great Church, 1994, Renaissance Institute Press, ISBN 0-9642773-0-1, © LOC 94-68169. Today it is considered the premier work on power in the church and a reference in the study of congregational dynamics. Clergy have purchased most of the 6,000 copies sold.
Author Britt Minshall
For the last seven years I have served as Senior Pastor of the Cathedral Church of Saint Matthew, a United Church of Christ. I have been a speaker at many National Church events including the 2002 Congress of Urban Churches in Chicago. Guest appearances on television, usually as consultant on how religious communities operate but occasionally on political matters involving the church are a regular part of my life.
At St. Matthews I have lead the church from an all white congregation of 60 or so, all in their mid-eighty’s, to over 200 people, at least half African American and a healthy mix of the rest. We are a social justice church with an active ministry with formerly addicted men and an on going ministry to prostituted women along the Harford Road –BelAir Road corridor. We have an active presence with orphanages and schools in Haiti, to where I travel at least three times per year. I take groups of people with me from all over the country.
Ring of Angels is written to expose the pernicious effects of American foreign policy on the people I live and work with in country. I expose the propaganda slogan “in the interest of the American people” for what it really is: a deadly lie that destroys lives all over the earth and degrades the greatest nation on earth to the level of a flesh peddler