General-Order

Jennifer brags too much and Stephanie says she's got a cool,mature,French brother. Till then the lie was small. But then Jennifer dares her to bring her brother. Then Allie comes to her save but Allie's brother is not much to look at. Watch out for fireworks.

This book is not only well written, it is full of great primary sources. I am doing doctoral work on Mary Magdalen and it has been very helpful in my research.

This book gives you a whole new outlook on living a christian life and how we handle it. As a husband and father, it has strengthened me in all my abilities. It also wakes you up to the fact that we can't be everything, but god can use us in his own way, how we are. I wish Dr. Faulkner only had more titles to dive into.

As a middle school math teacher I was amazed when a parent brought this book to me. It was great. It has lots of interesting activites to do in math along with some very good worksheets. After having the book for thirty minutes I had already done to activities for my 7th grade classroom. This would be a great book for teachers and parents who are looking for some extra practice for their students.

Maxwell Sackheim was one of the first advisors of the National Mail Order Association. His work is still in use today. Inventor of "Book of the Month Club" and the negative option technique. A great mail order history book. This is a must for all MO people. John Schulte, Chairman, National Mail Order Association.

Though not my absolute favorite of Al and Joanna Lacy's books, this one was a very nice read. The entire Mail Order Bride series is worth a look to anyone who likes historical Christian romance.
Anyway, the book is about a young woman, Diana, who lives in fear of an abusive father. She is willing to do almost anything to escape...even become a mail order bride. The man she secretly corresponds with is a selfish young man who places the ad because he is rebelling against his matchmaking parents. He gets his best friend,Knight, who is a writer at the local newspaper, to compose the ad. He later convinces Knight to answer his prospective bride's letters because he has a natural gift with words. Diana falls in love with the wonderful letters that she receives and eagerly journeys far from home to marry the man that has so touched her heart with his words. Knight has unwillingly fallen for Diana as well and dreads seeing her wed to his best friend. But when Diana arrives, her future husband is missing. As she joins the search for him, she is thrown into close proximity with Knight. As she falls for a man she can never have, she thinks that that is the worst possible thing that could ever happen, not knowing that her father has followed her and is determined to bring her home...no matter what.
The plot was interesting and I liked the hero and heroine a good deal, but the number one reason I have to suggest this book is that it features some of my writing. I was the winner of The Mail Order Bride writing contest and the ad and letters written by Diana and Knight that are featured in the book are all by me. I am recognized on the copyright page, or whatever it's called. So, give it a try and if you happen to like my letters look for anything written by me in the future. I'm a bestseller wannabe like most of us out there.

This is a strikingly beautiful book that discusses the history of the cult of saints in Medieval Europe. In a largely illiterate world various saints were championed by their follwers largely through the use of visual media. This book brings together for the first time all of the medieval hoopla associated with this phenomenon in a fascinating and highly informative text. Like NFL fans today, fans of various saints carried on public campaigns cheering their favorite saint, collecting funds to purchase relics and displaying visual stories in public venues telling the miraculous story of their saintly guy or gal.

The hopeful assertion that frames this elegant study is that "the pilgrim's experience is never completely beyond our reach" (82). In this revision of her 1994 Harvard dissertation, Professor Frank has her scholarly sights fixed on the "religious sensibilities" of late ancient Christians, gleaned primarily (although not exclusively) from two Christian accounts of pilgrimages to visit Egyptian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries: the anonymous Historia monachorum in Aegypto and Palladius' Historia Lausiaca. Frank's study aims at more than a description of the inner world of two Christian travelers, however: it seeks also to articulate how students of late ancient Christianity might write a historical account of "religious experience" without being naïve or essentialist. To this end, she employs tools of literary analysis, as well as social-historical and anthropological studies, to craft a narrative that is theoretically aware while remaining sympathetic to its subject. Through careful analysis of "the poetics of pilgrims' writings" (3), Frank pursues a finer understanding of "the religious sensibilities behind pilgrimage to the living" (31).

In chapter one, Frank places the practice and the literature of "pilgrimage to the living" in their social and literary contexts. Here she lays out some of the central themes that will emerge from her study: exoticism in these Christian travel writings, the "biblical realism" that informed and emerged from these texts, and the emphasis on visuality as the privileged transmitter of moral and divine truth.

The second chapter examines these historiai as means of "cultural translation" (37), mediating the foreignness of Egyptian asceticism to the more temperate climate of "everyday" Christians. Palladius and the anonymous author of the Historia monachorum emphasized and exoticized the spatial and temporal distance between the reader and the "living saint," who inhabited a thoroughly biblical and miraculous world. According to Frank, the miraculous and exotic were familiar tropes from Hellenistic travel writing, and she concludes that these literary "displacements" served both to mediate the strangeness of the desert ascetic for a more worldly Christian audience and to allow that audience to "experience" the Bible in a new and thrilling register.

In chapter 3, Frank turns away from her historiai to other texts that recount travel (literal and figurative) to "people," including mystical accounts of ascent to God (Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses ), visions of heroes and villains in para-dise and hell (the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul ), and hagiographic accounts of pilgrimage to ascetic figures (Jerome's Life of Paul the First Hermit ). This particular concatenation of physical and spiritual "travels" allows Frank to isolate a persistently articulated desire on the part of the traveler: the desire to see the face of the object of travel and achieve thereby an ultimately salvific ex-perience.

The remaining chapters build on this insight. Chapter 4 asks why visuality was the preferred sensory idiom of the pilgrim's experience, while chapter 5 turns to the question of "the ascetic face" as the object of religious desire and medium of divine transformation. Through an examination of classical sources on "the senses" and the literature of pilgrimage to holy sites, Frank concludes in chapter 4 that, throughout antiquity, vision retained a peculiarly "tactile" quality, so that sight and touch together were means by which experience itself was encoded and understood. Through a reading of physiognomic literature, Frank determines in chapter 5 that "the ascetic face" was the site (and sight) at which Christians could best visualize, and appropriate, a desired "biblical realism." For these pilgrim-authors, "the face had become the canvas of biblical identity"; as such, the saints' faces "functioned as another tool by which to fragment and selectively reassemble the pilgrims' experiences" (162-64). Through the faces of the living saints to whom they traveled (and whom they inscribed in their historiai ), these Christian authors "found a language for portable sanctity" (170).

The final chapter embeds these conclusions about the function of travel writing and Christian physiognomy into a broader theory of "visual piety," by which Frank signals "Christian practices in which a lingering gaze conjures a sacred presence" (174). She considers the later Christian phenomena of relic and icon veneration, and suggests that "by this tactile and conjuring eye of faith, pilgrims articulated a theology of vision that would find its fullest expression in the cult of icons" (181).

One place where Frank's analysis loses some traction is in the use of non-Christian sources to inform Christian texts. It is unclear how she envisions the literary or contextual relationship between these bodies of literature: Is it a question of cultural "appropriation" or "background" (see 32)? Are we to imag-ine a common "affinity" or "resemblance" (56-58) between world-views, "echoes" (129), or a wholesale "Christianization" of pagan sensibilities (163)? Her use of diverse non-Christian sources is at times ingenious and illuminating (the use of physiognomic literature is particularly deft), but in her careful tri-angulation of literature, experience, and world-view, the confrontation of poten-tially competing or complementary literatures, experiences, and world-views could only enrich her study.

This is, however, an extremely minor quibble. The graceful language and use of both Christian and non-Christian sources, from Phlegon of Tralles to Euna-pius of Sardis, make this volume a fitting addition to Peter Brown's Transformation of the Classical Heritage series. Throughout the work, Frank is refreshingly consistent in both her critical reading and sympathetic approach to ancient religious experiences. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars interested in the intersections of thought and action, of literature and life, will find tremendous value in the subject and approach of this book.

Andrew S. Jacobs

This book was an excellent introduction to metamathematics. It covered mathematical logic, set theory, the fundamentals of number systems, among other topics. Very enlightening view of metamathematics!

The author, a Trappist monk, is know to friends of mine. The book is very reader friendly and also quite informative. The author describes the spiritual life of monastics in general with emphasis on the Trappist life. While this book does not specifically address how a lay person might use these spiritual practices, it is clear that one could begin to incorporate them into their daily life. This book could be useful for any person interested in deepening their relationship with God.

Chapters include silence, work, prayer, and the other components of monastic life. Clear, understandable rational for the benefits of the specific practices are given. A minor drawback is a lack of reference to the Rule of Benedict or Holy Scripture for the practice. However, the readability of the book makes up for this.