The "Handbook of Church Discipline" by Jay Adams is a must for all pastors and lay workers alike. This book will give you clear, detailed information on a greatly overlooked area in our churches today, and yet it is concise enough to refer to at a glance whenever you need to. If you have ever had a disagreement, miscommunication, or unreconciled relationship with someone and wondered what to do, this book will direct you to the Scriptural answers laid out by Jesus Himself. Focusing on Matthew 18:15-17, Dr. Adams tackles an area where, sadly, few dare to tread. He details the process of both informal and formal discipline to give you a working knowledge of this subject to apply in your relationships with family, friends, your church, and unbelievers as well. If you wish to have a dynamic church for our Lord, and personal relationships with others that will reflect your love for God, I challenge you to read this book, search the Scriptures, and apply our Lord's teachings. May your life and ministry be blessed as mine has!

The "Handbook of Church Discipline" by Jay Adams is a must for all pastors and lay workers alike. This book will give you clear, detailed information on a greatly overlooked area in our churches today, and yet it is concise enough to refer to at a glance whenever you need to. If you have ever had a disagreement, miscommunication, or unreconciled relationship with someone and wondered what to do, this book will direct you to the Scriptural answers laid out by Jesus Himself. Focusing on Matthew 18:15-17, Dr. Adams tackles an area where, sadly, few dare to tread. He details the process of both informal and formal discipline to give you a working knowledge of this subject to apply in your relationships with family, friends, your church, and unbelievers as well. If you wish to have a dynamic church for our Lord, and personal relationships with others that will reflect your love for God, I challenge you to read this book, search the Scriptures, and apply our Lord's teachings. May your life and ministry be blessed as mine has!

Over the years editor Frank N. Magill has focused attention of the classics to several generations of readers. What he tries and usually succeeds in doing is to make comprehensible all genres of literature from several cultures. His latest effort, MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE is a worthy addition to the serious reader of the sorts of literature that are taught in the mainstream American universities. In MAL, the contributing reviewers describe 199 classics ranging from the colonial to the modern age. Each entry includes basic genre data: date of publication, type of work, author, locale, principal characters, plot summary, and critical evaluation. The critical evaluation sections tend to be the most informative since it is precisely here that the undergraduate reader will most likely find a vision that will come in handy at termpaper and exam time.
There is an inherent flaw in summary books of this type, and regardless of how well such a book is written, the editors cannot avoid it. This flaw lies in the reader's acceptance of the editor's expertise in choosing representative works that tie in with the editors' stated intent. Now who am I to put my own puny vision above that of the distinguished and erudite editors?
Still, since I am both a rational and critical thinker, Magill's choices, which include acts of commission as well as omission, often leave me gasping in disbelief. I have no problem with standard choices like Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING or Mark Twain's LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI or even thoroughly controversial ones like Nabokov's LOLITA, but too many literary near-misses, has-beens, and never-wases somehow wind up included at the expense of far more worthy contenders. Why include potboilers like Erskine's TOBACCO ROAD or routine westerners like McMurty's LONESONE DOVE?
I would have appreciated an introduction that contained a rationale for Magill's choices. Had he approached the always dicey question of what makes one work of literature stand out enough to be a 'masterpiece,' then the reader's ability to think about such abstact qualities as characters' impacting both on each other and on the reader might be stimulated enough to lead this reader to take the book of plot summaries and do something really daring--to read the work itself and draw his own conclusions. And that to me is the ultimate goal of any piece of criticism.

This collection of approximately 200 American autobiographies, novels, plays, poetry, short stories, and essays is essential for any library, public or personal.

It is an irreplaceable guide for students and scholars, or anyone who appreciates our American heritage of literature from the colonial times to the present.

The reader is afforded a complete description of the principal characters, a synopsis of the story, and a critical evaluation of the story, as well. The type of work, the author, the type of plot, the date of the work, and the location of the work are also provided.

You will feel like you just read each literary work, even if you have never read it before.

On the Complexities of the 'dipus Complex'DIPAL PARADIGMS IN COLLISION: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (1897-1997)By Howard Covitz, 1997Peter Lang Publishers. 408 pp. $59.95Reviewed by Richard Peters, Ed.D.It has now been just more than one hundred years since Sigmund Freud introduced to a sometimes eager and sometimes belligerent audience a drama which he claimed was played out in the mind and behaviors of every toddler, exactly as it was acted out in Sophocles¹ 'dipus and Shakespeare¹s Hamlet. In support of his now famous arguments, Freud would frequently summarize his position with Diderot¹s comment that: ³If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother². Since that time, generations of practitioners and anthropologists, literary critics and dramatists, feminists and even religious scholars have done battle with this Freudian paradigm of human development. And Battle Lines were drawn. A camp of Orthodox Psychoanalysts developed. These students of the Old Doctor from Vienna came to view the 'dipus Complex as a membership-determining Shibboleth; those who failed to incorporate this thinking into their own models were deemed heretical and would find it difficult to publish their views in the journals of the Inner Circle. Others came to see belief in the 'dipus Complex as an indication of adherence to arcane or misguided thinking and, by 1938, Edward Glover¹s survey of British analysts showed that fewer than half of them considered the 'dipus complex to be of primary importance in the development of neuroses.More recently, however, volumes, journal articles and pieces in literary reviews have centered not on the 'dipus Complex per se, but rather on Freud the Man. Was Freud a confused Biologist (Solloway)? Did he lie about this or that to protect his professional image (Masson)? Was he a not-well and lost Soul (Crews)? Did he sleep with his sister-in-law (Swales)? ... Ad hominem Freud-bashing ‹ if one is to measure by popular articles in literary circles ‹ has become a sport for the intelligentsia. Into the fray steps Howard Covitz with his own lengthy investigation of the 'dipus Complex. In a work suitable for both the professional and the interested layperson, he suggests that one may best accept Freud¹s studies as one would the testimony of an unimpeachable witness. What Freud saw is unquestionable; his interpretations and conclusions, as is the case with any scientific claims, are ever open to scrutiny. And it is not only toward Freud¹s work that Covitz casts this skeptical eye. For even with his own conclusions, garnered from more than twenty years of practice and the training of others (he is Director of a Bryn Mawr, PA psychoanalytic training institution), he remains skeptical; he wonders, near the close of this volume, whether or not Freud could, after all, have been correct and he, Covitz, in error. This is, when all is said and done, a skeptical investigation that remains entrenched in a pragmatic view of Science that claims only to contribute, while making no pretence of canonical truth; this is, for that reason, a rare volume indeed in today¹s tabloid culture. While full justice will not be done to Dr. Covitz¹s argument or to his lively and freewheeling literary style, a summary view may be presented. Freud spoke of not only the often caricatured Positive 'dipus (the wish to kill the same-sex parent and possess the other-sex one), but of a Complete Complex in which the child alternates the identity of the parent he or she intends to kill and with whom he or she aims to incestuously connect. Can this two-way complex, Covitz ponders, be attributed to sexual Biology? After a clear and respectful review of Freud¹s work on the subject and a focusing on certain confusions that remain in Freud¹s writings, Covitz tentatively concludes otherwise.Three chapters follow in which the works of latter day contributors to the psychoanalytic dialogue are explored for their understanding of the OEdipus. Time and again, the author finds analysts noting the toddler¹s difficulty in accepting the inner thoughts and stirrings of another person ‹ a fact hardly surprising to parents! Could it be, then, that at the core of the 'dipal drama is some hardwired difficulty that we all experience in accepting the fact that there are relationships that exclude us? And if this is so, could it not also be that what Freud discovered was the toddler¹s introduction to this conundrum ‹ namely, his or her initial incapacity to accept, as Covitz notes, that parents, in their nonparental roles, are not ubiquitously preoccupied with discussions surrounding how best to raise their youngster? The volume tentatively accepts this hypothesis of early narcissistic disappointment.After an intriguing search for a literary leitmotif garnered from the Book of Genesis (with emphasis on the narcissism of Joseph son of Jacob), the volume offers a possible sequence of stages that each of us must, in time, transcend. These represent a progression from pure self-reference to the capacities necessary for love of another and for membership in, what Covitz calls, polities of mutual concern and interest. Central to these new capacities for the toddler is a beginning awareness that others have their own thoughts and relationships, and that others are subjects in their own right and not simply objects-to-be-manipulated in the child¹s world. And, finally the author claims, it is consequent to the development of this capacity that a sense of justice (which Freud attributed to the Superego) develops. These claims starkly reorder the psychoanalytical landscape.Two tasks close the volume. The first involves a scathing critique of the manner in which statistics has been misunderstood (Covitz had been a Mathematician before turning to Psychoanalysis) by Psychologists investigating the 'dipus. The second task brings Covitz to examine the manner in which his alternative view of the 'dipus might affect our cultural notions of the Good Life and our socio-political imperatives. Here, without severely criticizing the author, one might wonder whether the author¹s socially liberal views on the origins of prejudice would not have been better suited to another venue, or if they skew any of his conclusions?A brief comment is in order concerning the style of this volume. First, no where in this work is there evidence of a need to either idealize or to deprecate the basic paradigms of psychoanalysis or its founder. Covitz is neither an iconoclast nor an ancestor worshipper! In its place, we find an attempt to bridge theoretical differences by providing a deeper and integrative understanding of concepts that are often treated as self-evident in the prevailing literature ‹ and by taking nothing for granted. Secondly, the volume adopts an easy-going style that invites the reader into this difficult territory. He provides explanatory footnotes that are, in fact, quite helpful for the uninitiated. There are occasional self-revelations about the author and his views (what the author calls the Reader¹s Right to Know) ‹ sometimes with humor. The general appeal of the volume is notable in the testimonials that adorn its back cover: the first from a religion professor who views the volume as ³not only remarkably pioneering but visionary²; the second from a feminist author who proclaims in her reading of this study the discovery of a psychoanalytic framework that, at long last, allows her to read the ³'dipal and the feminine side-by side²; and the third from a Freudian analyst who lauds the author for rescuing ³the 'dipus complex from Freud¹s biological and non-developmental frames of reference.² Odd bedfellows, joining together to recommend this work!It has been some time since a volume appeared that made a significant contribution to a psychoanalytic understanding of human nature and did so in an inviting fashion and without hiding behind professional jargon. And while this volume is not for the intellectually faint-of-heart, the reader who is willing to follow its author on a hearty and vigorous trek into the netherworld of the life of the toddler, and a flight into the rarified strata of solid thinking and argument in the context of Psychoanalysis will reap appropriate rewards. Dr. Richard Peters, Psychologist, ex-Psychoanalyst, long-time director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Institute and Founder of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, practices individual and group systems-oriented psychotherapies in Paoli, PA and is co-author of ³The Visible and Invisible Group² and other works.

Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vPreface ix1.The 'dipus Complex: 1 Freud & the Birth of a ConstructLetters to a Friend: A Beginning ‹ Freud: The Years before the 'dipus Complex ‹ The Introduction of the 'dipus Complex ‹ The Phylogenetic Excursion & Other Pre-Ego Psychological Works ‹ Two 'dipus Complexes at the Time of Freud¹s Ego Psychology ‹ Freud¹s Specific and Final Formulations.2. Some Elementary Contributions from 33Ego PsychologyA Difference of Focus at the Changing of the Guard ‹ From Magical Thinking Towards a More General Theory of Structure: Hartmann et al. ‹ The Middle Generation: What to Do with the 'dipus Complex? ‹ Hans Loewald: A First Look at The Symbolic & The Elemental ‹ Some Brief Concluding Remarks on the Contributions from Freud & Ego Psychology.3. On the Road to Autonomy and Identity: 61Some Contributions from the Developmentalist, Margaret MahlerMargaret Mahler¹s Brush with the 'dipus Complex: Normal Autism through the Rapprochement Subphase ‹ A Babel of Definitions: A Lifelong Quest for Object Constancy.4. A World of Objects: 85Self, Others, Affects & DrivesA 1915 Model for Objects, Drives & Affects ‹ An Early Notion of Emotions vis-a-vis Internalized Object Relations ‹ A Congeries of Object Relational Models ‹ A Brief Polemical Excursion: Instinct Theory & Relational Theories.5.A Battle Against Narcissism? 127Personal Reflections on the Ethos of GenesisOn the Reader¹s Right to Know ‹ Why Genesis? ‹ Genesis in Several Pages ‹ Murder in Genesis ‹ Three Instances of Incest and Two Divine Executions ‹ Defying the Deity and Other Transgressions ‹ Defiance in the Garden ‹ The Generation of Noah & the Tower of Babel ‹ Abraham ‹ Joseph and His Dreams ‹ Some Closing Thoughts on Sin in Genesis.6. An Elementary Model of 'dipal Development 161Some Thoughts on Psychological Models ‹ A Brief Caveat to the Reader ‹ The 'dipus as Organizer ‹ Dyads on the Road from Narcissism to Socialized Object Love ‹ The Acceptance of An-other¹s Relationships: Transcendence and Intersubjectivity ‹ Components of a Model for 'dipal Development ‹ Concluding Comments.7.A Review and Initial Discussion of Constructs 217Anjous and Boscs or Apples and Oranges ‹ Where We¹ve Been: The Argument ‹ Some Methodological Pitfalls & the Analysis of Grouped Data ‹ Propositions and Predictions ‹ Attachments ‹ Sexual & Incestuous Fantasies ‹ Repression & Conscience ‹ Identification Processes ‹ On Terminating the 'dipus ‹ Duration of 'dipus ‹ 'dipal Gender Distinctions ‹ Some Trappings of the Resolution of the 'dipus ‹ Concluding Thoughts about a Wish List.8. Empirical Studies and Some Others 255Attachments ‹ Sexual & Incestuous Fantasies ‹ Repression & Conscience ‹ Identification Processes ‹ On Terminating the 'dipus ‹ Duration of 'dipus ‹ 'dipal Gender Distinctions ‹ Some Trappings of the Resolution of the 'dipus ‹ A Brief and Summary Chart of Our Progress.9. Conclusions & Recommendations 301Some Successes: Some Disappointments ‹Implications for the Continuation of Freud¹s Model ‹ Support for the Elemental 'dipal: Chapters 1-8 ‹ Concluding Thoughts on the State of These Two Models ‹ Deficits in the Arguments: Recommendations for Further Research.10.A Paradigm in Conflict Describing 317A Divided Mind in a Schismatic WorldA Paradigm in Conflict ‹ A Schismatic World ‹ A Taxonomic Gambit ‹ Closing Words and a Query: Is There an Homology between Pathogenesis and the Methods and Stages of Therapeutics?Glossary 341Bibliography 351

I would really like to obtain my own copy of this book. It is an excellent resource for artists and Christians who want to understand the visual signs of their faith. Persons designing banners would also benefit from this book.

This book is a great teaching tool. It clearly illustrates, and defines the meanings of, and the history to the different symbols used in the Christian church. It is one of the best reference books on this subject found. I would love to find my very own copy.

I almost always underline/jot-notes-to-myself-in-the-margins when I read a book. This book, however, is so meticulously written, that I am breathless in the hand. My copy is spotless, just as Alter's polemic/ecstatic statement is without flaw. This book is endlessness, and I will let it inform me for the rest of my life.

I found a copy of this book second-hand at the Strand in New York, and bought it on the basis of its title. Once I began reading it, however, I found the title to be slightly misleading. By "Reading," Alter does not so much mean the phsyical act of sitting down and reading a book (though he does touch upon that in his introduction). He is more concerned with issues of "reading" in the context of interpretation. His opening chapter is a refutation of certain modern cabals of lit-crit, after which he goes on to examine the very things that make literature literature: Metaphor, Allusion, Structure, Perspective, etc. His marvellous use of examples, his insightful analysis of these same examples, all make for a great reading experience. This book is not only for scholars, but also for anyone interested in looking more closely at literature. One feels awed at Alter's enormous breadth of reading. This book is truly a classic, and it's a shame it's generally unavailable. Perhaps Alter's little book is not "modern" (i.e. trendy) scholarship, but it is clear, straightfoward and eminently cogent. In a perfect world, this book would be read in every high school english class.

This book opened my eyes about the complexity of post-colonial studies, and finally defines it with examples from around the globe. It shows that post-colonial studies are really not just about the British colonies anymore, but applies to North and South America as well. It also shows that contemporary scholarship can be an exciting and entertaining read. I would recommend this book for students of literature and cultural geography alike. It should also be useful for anybody interested in environmental and social justice, and the continuing worldwide effect of centuries of colonization.

This collection of essays on the field of post-colonial studies, offers perspectives on texts from both sides of the Atlantic, challenging the emerging consensus on post-colonial literatures in the process. The contributors discuss a diversity of related topics, from case studies of specific authors to theoretical investigations of such fundamental questions as the role of literary study within multicultural societies.

I read 55 books in 1973 and this volume on marriage cases in Church courts was the best of the 55. It carefully examines 6 marriage cases. Reading this book made me wish I were a canon lawyer!

John Noonan, now a prominent judge on the federal Circuit Court of Appeals, was also for many years a respected scholar of canon law history. This work, based on Noonan's direct study of Vatican archives, caused quite stir upon its publication in 1972, by painting an accurate, if not entirely flattering, picture of the complex canonical process by which, prior to the Second Vatican Council, Catholic marriage cases were adjudicated. The work is respectful of canonical tradition and, in my opinion, basically wanted only to see a franker admission by some canonical judges that adjudicating marriage cases is as much an art as it is a science.

for the reasons stated by another reviewer. But this book does beg a few questions. I think Halivni could have gone into more detail about his reasons for believing the Torah's text is imperfect - perhaps by discussing in more depth classical commentators' attempts to explain away those imperfections, and then responding to those attempts. And the entire argument begs a question: if the written Torah is imperfect, how can the oral Torah be any less so?

In this fascinating and provocative book, Rabbi Halivni is arguing that although the written Torah -- the Chumash or Pentateuch -- was most probably "compiled" by Ezra and his entourage after the return from the Babylonian exile, it is nonetheless still 'Holy Writ' because the work of Ezra was a successful "restoration" of the Torah given to Moses. Although Halivni probably does not mean that the structure and textual surface of the Chumash closely resembles whatever written Torah crossed the Jordan with Joshua, Halivni does most likely mean that the content of the Chumash reliably expresses the content of the Sinaitic revelation, and contains remnants of whatever writings Moses produced or had produced during the Sinai sojourn.

If there is some uncertainty about Halivni's views concerning the superficial similarity of the Chumash with the original written Torah, it is because Halivni's focus is on the evidence for and theological implications of the notion that the present written Torah is the product of a restorative project by Ezra and his entourage. Halivni argues that the very fact that the Chumash contains uncertain passages, self-contradictions, and laws at variance with the Oral Torah, means that the compilers were working with source documents that were already considered so sacred that the compilers felt they could not make any corrections to the text being compiled. They selected and arranged the scriptural heritage, but they dared not correct it or add to it. Their project was to "restore" a unified written Torah from the strands and traditions available to them. They operated more like those who restore damaged paintings, than as painters.

Halivni aims to show that traditional Judaism can survive the onslaught of critical scholarship because the probablility that the written Torah is a composite document compiled from strands and traditions doesn't mean that it isn't a trustworthy "restoration" of the Torah given to Moses. If the component strands and traditions were various reliable witnesses to, or remanants of, the original Sinaitic revelation, then a restorative compilation of those trustworthy witnesses renders a written Torah which is Holy Writ.

There are many interesting sub-arguments in this book, all insightful, and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in Jewish Biblical Criticism or theology of revelation.

This is the most concise account of the shared origins of Gothic and Romantic I've read, and I've read several. The sections on publishing and on periodical reception are, on the whole, beautifully done. While the chapter on Joanna Baillie is an important contribution to what we know of that understudied dramatist, the chapter on Lyrical Ballads is without question the book's centerpiece.

Gamer's work offers a rare combination of intelligence and subversion. This readable, well-researched, brilliantly aruged book rightly turns most previously held ideas about "high Romantic literature" and popular culture on their heads. His thesis, that revered Romantic writers appropriated low-brow Gothic culture whilst denying it in order to elevate their own stature and reinforce their own valuations of "the Romantic" is eeriely applicable to the battles within our own culture today. I plan to incorporate this in my own teaching; it is a work whose implications far exceed the period which it addresses. It is also a refreshing departure from commonly turgid and overwrought academic writing. Bravo.

This book looks at a real inner spriual conflict and the search for meaning in a way that pulls you in, is funny and, when you're done, you feel that you've spent at least one small potion of your life doing something important. I'm going to buy this for everyone on my Christmas list. You should too.

Margaret McGee's Stumbling Toward God is a model for integrity in the search for meaning. She asks herself the hard questions - What or who is God? How can I embrace religion without abandoning science? Why do I pray? Asking these questions launches us on an amazing journey that leads the reader into a world where daily moments such as drying wet hair or turning the compost pile lead to the divine. McGee never goes for the easy, the clichéd, the stereotypical answers, but that doesn't mean this book is dry. Stumbling Toward God is riveting reading, fun and entertaining, even while it grapples with the author's and the reader's deepest hopes and doubts. I won't tell you the conclusion McGee reaches, because I don't want to spoil your own joy of discovery.