General-Order

This book probes the personality of Thomas More. It is less interested in his many public controversies and achievements (though many are treated) and more interested in providing the reader with a real taste of his personality and spirituality. Accounts of his relationship with his daughter are especially touching. Well written and not overwhelming, read this book and you might feel like you know the man. A Great Introduction to More. I could not put this book down and still find myself re-reading and refering to it.

Most lives of saints consist of autobiographical writings (few believers can stand those, too close to home deficiencies) and third person testimonies of sanctity (can make an unbeliever out of the most trenchant spiritual reader). This one breaks the mold. A jesuit psychologist deconstructs Ignatius psyche and out of the fragments he finds the father of his order: human, problematic, a saint for our times and place...not to mention our neurosis. Recommended without the couch.

A Treasury of Women Saints shows that women are hardly the doorway to Hell and the cause of man's downfall. In fact, some of them were the means by which their husbands and children became sanctified.

These women aren't too much different from you and me, except for one thing: they rose above their difficulties and united their consciousness with God-consciousness. The Treasury offers much in the way of just how each individual woman found divine union with God for herself. An inspiration and a divine example for women today to do the same.

This is history at its best. Butler's work discusses the emergent class and ethnic tensions in a industrial midwestern town and situates its history in the larger patterns of change across America. Butler's style and writing has a flare and a richness unique in historical accounts of this sort--I could not put the book down! Butler has style!

Very simply...a beautiful book. Much deserving to be on your bookshelf or on your side table. You'll look at it again and again.

The premise of this book, the unwritten order, is so intriguing I wondered how John Edward Ames would pull this off. Sudden death at the start of this novel grabs the reader and pull you through the long trail of redemtion. This is one of the finest westerns I have ever read (and I've read a lot - I'm a professional writer). Mr. Ames has painted a vast canvass with memorable characters and gripping situations. This is one fine novel.

Boyer's URBAN MASSES AND MORAL ORDER was a book just ahead of its time. In the Foucauldian spirtit of the historical genealogy which has become the standard form of books about social power, Boyer periodizes the many manifestations of social control that rose in American cities from 1820 to 1920.

The first social control programs were the Tract Societies who distributed tracts showing new urban populations how to live morally, according to a kind of outdated bucolic Christian ideal. When tracts didn't work (none of the methods worked at all well according to Boyer), a number of other missionary societies stepped in with new ideas: the Children's Aid Society, the YMCA, the Salvation Army, the Settlement Movement, and finally, the City Beautiful Movement. Many of these societies went after children as the best hope for saving innocent urban unfortunates from the ills of the city, their ethnic parents, and the filthy Catholic and Jewish denizens of the tenements. The only exception was the Children's Aid Society whose founder saw urban urchins as extremely savvy, smart and supremely adaptive. Nonetheless, the Children's Aid Society shipped young people out to rural America in the belief that they could better prosper elsewhere than in the city. Most of the time this was done with parental consent, but sometimes kids claimed to be orphans so they could have an adventure with their friends.

Boyer's largest theme is the tracing of slow retreast of the strategy of personal contacts with the urban poor rendered by the "friendly visitor" of these many organizations as the means for moral uplift and social control, and its eventual replacement by the notion that a new achitecture, a new environment of playgrounds, swimming pools, outdoor concerts would have a mass civilizing effect. The prosletyzing was done in the form of buildings and patrolled urban spaces. Sans the religion, but still full of the moralizing and improving rhetoric, the progressive age government was enlisted in these new strategies of social control. And, of course, eventually, the "friendly vistior" became the social worker. But the same goal was pursued -- turning scary immigrants into solid middle-class citizens. Positive resentimentalizaion through civil space, through education, through public art in public museums, etc., is still a major strategy in large cities. Art and high culture as a moral instrument.

Boyer's other large theme is that all of these movements were essentially the same -- the tactics barely changed from generation to generation, with the exception of the spatial solution which had a different means but the same hoped for end. As one exhausted organization after another gave up, new organizations sprung to take their place, most of them presided over by men from rural communities who had moved to the city and were disturbed by the lack of social cohesion and surveillance they had experience growing up, and so sought to impose their rural or town Christian values and moral controls upon the city dwellers. The Puritans practiced this form of coercion in their small settlements, until the flock dispersed to such an extent that social control through surveillance could not work. By the end of the 19th century, city dwellers surpassed country dwellers, and much of the impetus of these early movements faded.

There is, of course, a parallel now with the Southern fundamentalists trying to impose their beliefs on the "godless" cities of the Northeast. In fact, in reading URBAN MASSES AND MORAL ORDER with an eye toward the rise of the South in the 70s and 80s, the same kinds prosletytizing are apparent. Although the intent of this particular social control movement was at odds with the free market ideologists on the other side of the conversative movement, the moral conservatives of the South and West (which had always been backward until vast flows of Federal money were diverted there by Southern senators after WWII), needed an ideology to go along with their grab for power. So, once again, we in the wicked urban North once more got to hear about our moral corruption -- as if nearly two hundred years of it weren't enough already.

A great read, a great synthesis, a real classic.

Although Brian Fogarty's War and Peace and the Social Order probably is intended for sociologists and for classroom use, I fall into neither category and read and enjoyed the entire book. It's interesting, well written, and flows smoothly. Fogarty understands the basic principle of writing: he begins each paragraph with a topic sentence and follows it with several supporting examples. These illustrations are one of the great strenghs of the book: they include comparisons between older, traditonal societies and modern ones, movements such as civil rights and the women's equality movement, and the cooperation of the German people with the Nazi's during WW II, etc. The second chapter is heavy on theory and the fifth chapter on the military industrial complex is mindbogglingly complex, but that seems to be the way things are with military mathematics.These chapters are necessary, however, and the reader shouldn't ignore them just because they require effort. The book as a whole is an excellent mesh of theory and concrete examples. The author provides a wide variety of illustrations on ways to achieve peace through non-violent social justice movements i.e. Ghandi's "change of heart." Fogarty handles a big topic in a small book. He does it well. His book is an excellent tool for a citizen who cares about his or her society to become educated on an imporant subject and to learn how to act congruent with that that knowledge.

This little book is a collection of stories and anecdotes about Anthony De Mello and his life. It is full of great wisdom and gives some illumination in a biographical sense. If you have read anything else by this great teacher, you will appreciate this. It gives insight into an authentic heart that expressed itself fearlessly.

In 1850, Eric Jansson of Sweden, a charismatic leader confident in his divine mission, led some 1,200 followers to the United States, marking the beginning of the exodus of emigrants from Sweden to North America. This book tells Jansson's story, from his birth in Biskopskulla, through his receiving his diving mandate, his conflict with the Lutheran state-church, his emigration to the United States, and his eventual death. Along the way, Paul Elmen, a Professor of Moral Theology at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, looks at Jansson's theology and its roots, what made conflict between it and Swedish Lutheranism inevitable, and how it differed from Wesleyan theology.

If you are interested in Eric Jansson, or the commune he formed at Bishop Hill, Illinois, USA, then you really must read this book. It covers Eric Jansson's life in greater detail than I have ever seen it covered. Also, Professor Elmen's examination of Jansson's theology was quite fascinating, and gave me a greater understanding of what he and his followers believed. Overall, I thought that this was an excellent book on Eric Jansson, one that I highly recommend.