Setting our Faces toward Jerusalem
book review of
Edith Stein: Trusting God's Purpose

by Sister Fran Gangloff, OSF

During the week of September 11, 2001, the day of the four suicide airplane hijackings and terrorist attacks on the United States, I received in the mail a review copy of - Edith Stein: Trusting God's Purpose - in the series of 'a retreat with' published by St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001. The book is authored by Patricia L. Macks, the 74 page, softcover book (ISBN - 086716 - 387 - 9)

The title of Day One struck me immediately - 'Setting our faces toward Jerusalem.' For it seems to me that our whole country and most of the world and each one of us are called by the tragic events to face the suffering with courage and determination, to set out faces steadily like flint as Jesus did toward the Holy City - where suffering and death encompass the seekers of truth and peace.

Edith faced her finest moment, knowing full what it meant, when Nazi soldiers arrested her at the Carmel at Echt in Holland. She said to her sister (blood sister and companion in the Carmel convent) - 'Come Rosa, let us go to die for our people.'

The seven day retreat moves through the themes of - Jerusalem, Relationship, Empathy, Prayer, Eucharist, Sabbath, and Cross - using Jewish and Christian reference points in Edith's life and writings as a Jewish woman, intellectual scholar, convert to Catholicism, and Carmelite nun. Edith, AKA Sister Benedicta, victim of the 1940's Holocaust and recently canonized saint of the Catholic Church, becomes in this book a wonderful mentor and guide for our own difficult times.

A retreat with Edith deepens respect for the religious rights and beliefs of all persons. When Edith, in her final days, told others - 'we are traveling east' - she knew it was toward a death camp. Her words also hold a larger meaning - we are traveling from the seen reality to unseen truth where God may be found - west or east. We set our faces toward Jerusalem.

The book lists eight suggestions for Deepening Your Acquaintance with Edith. Having read and studied them all, I strongly agree and highly recommend these choices. I also highly recommend this Edith Stein retreat book.

Jewish faith and Christian faith were changed forever in the aftermath of the Holocaust. We are still feeling its effects 60 years later. All religious faiths in America - Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and all the others - are deeply changed forever and challenged by the events of 9 - 11 and its aftermath. This book - used as retreat or personal meditation and prayer - strengthens us to set our faces like flint, like Jesus, toward the pain of these changes and challenges. We set our faces toward Jerusalem.

It's a pity this elegant book is now out of print, since it traces the artistic evolution of Mark Klett, one of our foremost American landscape photographers. Combining his knowledge of geology with his interest in photography, Klett saw himself originally as a direct artistic descendant of great 19th Century American photographers such as Carleton Watkins and Timothy O'Sullivan. Indeed, one of his earliest projects was to photograph again the same locales these photographers photographed during their work as official photographers to several U. S. government scientific surveys. Klett's work shows a deep affection and appreciation of the American landscape, especially the Southwest. Yet it is also a series of cautionary visual tales noting how we have inadvertently ruined that landscape through pollution and other signs of human activity. Hopefully this splendid book will be published again soon.

These people are ahead of their time - if you had a chance to catch the Guggenheim retrospective of the same name, you know what I am talking about. In 50 years, more people will know about Arakawa and Gins than right now, but why wait? We need to change the direction of humanity NOW!

This book goes though the vast output of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, from Arakawa's thought-provoking conceptual paintings from the 60's, to their more current philosophies about the body and architectural surround.

The pictures are colorful and vivid, every page is different and exciting. Their newer computer renderings of beautiful organic housing projects will blow you away. When you open a book like this in a room full of people, everyone will gather around you to get a look! When something is different than the norm but still maintains logic and beauty, it naturally attracts people.

Get this book before it becomes a collector's item.

This book is really an eyeopener for me and shocked me with the facts about how many elderly are wrongly diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease when they in fact have treatable other memory problems. I'd recommend it to anyone with a memory problem, including me! Also, it is reassuring that many of the things, ie forgetting names, forgetting where my car is in parking lot are not signs of serious memory loss. Also, this book emphasized to me the effect of depression on memory problems, which is comforting. The book is very caring and hopeful filled with practical advice to share with your doctor. I hope it is updated and reissued though. Valuable to read and helpful overview for people with loved ones bewildered with memory problems.

This is the best introduction to McKeon's thught. His standing as a thinker will be seen as rooted in rhetoric, someday. As a former student of McKeon's (from the 1950s)it is my opinion that Mark Backman has done an outstanding job editing and introducing McKeon's work. Read these essays and forego the rest. It's all here. See, also, Backman's own book, Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise as Self-Consciousnes, for proof that he's one of the few McKeon students to understand the man's work.

This book will do exactly what they said wasn't possible by illustrating how video and sound can be integrated into your Flash presentations, placing you at the extreme edge of creative web design. The application of such tools as AfterEffects, QuickTime, SoundForge and Wildform test the boundaries of Flash and suggest ways to take sound and video beyond Flash and into the realms of Shockwave.

Showing you how to break your site down and incorporate video and sound, the techniques covered in this book capitalise on the capabilities of Flash whilst tackling its limitations head-on. It will then look at how to take web ideo and sound a step further with Shockwave presentations.

The "Sweet Dropper," as the heavenly Doctor Sibbes has been called, will live up to his name in this finely written and meticulously researched book. Mark Dever himself may well deserve such a moniker, being one of the few scholars (this is his PhD. dissertation from Cambridge) who can speak as eloquently as he writes. Anyone who has had to crawl through the desert of arid scholastic tomes, or swim the oceans of pedantic language, will find Dever's work a delightful exception.

The book is divided into two parts.

Part one is biographical material. While the writing itself is lively enough, sadly, the subject matter is not. Alas Sibbes was no Bunyan. But Dever does the historical reader a favor by revealing a couple of overlooked facts, correcting repeated mistakes of former historians. Sibbes was neither the disenfranchised preacher of lore, who lived out the remainder of his life in obscurity, nor was he a rebel-rousing nonconformist, but rather a moderate Puritan, more the reformer rather than a revolutionary.

Part two explores the theology of Sibbes, appropriately distinguishing him as one of the last of the great English reformers. The author highlights several salient features of Sibbes as a Reformed theologian. Of special interest, Dever adroitly dispels the misconception that Sibbes was an irrational or even an a-rational mystic. The "Sweet Dropper" was nothing of the kind but rather an affectionate theologian, scrupulously concerned with the centrality of the heart and the proper role of the conscience, specifically an educated one.

This reader came away with three specific encouragements:
1.Sibbes believed that godly preaching was the salvation of the Church of England. So should it is for any church in any generation.
2.Sibbes was a reforming conformist. He was a hesitator and a questioner but not a dissenter. Rather than separate from the established church, he elected to remain, attempting to bring reform from within. For those pastors and church leaders who labor in non-Reformed churches or denominations, his example will be of encouragement. Although history may show that his endeavor was actually an idle venture, such warm-hearted commitment will loom as a grand and noble gesture in the light of today's rabid transience and hyper-individualism.
3.Many voices today are clamoring for a new Reformation. As great as the need may be, much is cool, calculating, and highly polemical. Sibbes was a doctor of the heart. His tender, warm-heartedness needs to be rediscovered. Sibbes was the England of his day, what Jonathan Edwards was to America, both sharing a mutual concern for true religious affections.

A fresh look at the life of Richard Sibbes may well rekindle a warm-hearted passion for the gospel, based upon the great doctrines of the Protestant Reformation. This truth on fire was the hallmark of English Puritanism. Mark Dever has done a great service in reminding his readers of this fact.

I love it. It has hundreds of riddles from many times and cultures, including the answer to Lewis Carrol's "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" The first half goes into detail about the character and makeup of riddles, while the second half has riddles listed by author and their answers at the end.

I found this very helpful. loads of colorful datailed maps.

The book is fantastic. It is the first book I have found that shows all types of rigging techniques as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are many pictures of the systems on different boats with a couple of schematic diagrams. I would say the book is targeted at racers primarily, be it at club or national level. Its a very useful book if you are refitting a boat, as I did.

Neil Corrigall