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In The Celtic Way of Evangelism, George G. Hunter III explores the spiritual landscape which made Patrick's Ireland (and my local pub) a ready recipient of God's grace. Hunter, dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission at Asbury Theological Seminary, developed his view of relational evangelism in an environment not unlike my own. He learned that "stained-glass jargon" doesn't play well on the sands and surfboards of muscle beach. ...Perhaps that is why Hunter's perspective of Celtic Christianity resonates so strongly.

Hunter's retelling of the story of Patrick the Precedent Postmodern provides an able framework for understanding the possibilities and priority of mission. Patrick's own spiritual quest, including rejection of his father's religion and discovery of truth in the midst of brokenness, is of foremost and foundational importance. A Briton, Patrick was captured as a teenager by pirates and enslaved in Ireland. During his time as a cattle-herder near the turn of the fifth century, Patrick experienced three transformations which would equip him in his calling. First, he experienced the truth of an intimate relationship with Jesus. Second, he learned who the Irish people were, of their customs and culture. Third, he grew to have genuine love for his captor-brothers. These experiences reflect the three conditions for dynamic and convincing communication found in Aristotle's Rhetoric. Patrick's personal conversion gave him ethos, his understanding of the Celtic people provided pathos, and his love for his captors was his logos.

Patrick was freed from his seminary of servitude after six years, but returned as a missionary nearly three decades later still with this passion within. His Irish pagan hosts were receptive to this message because many aspects of their tribal druidic religions could find relative comparisons in true Christianity. An appreciation for paradox, an acceptance of the complexities of deity, an awareness of nature, the power of tale and fable, common virtues and values, a love for the riddling rhetorical triads and even fascination with the number three were all relatable ways Patrick could immediately and extensively explain the Christ-story.

Patrick's Celtic Christianity also provides a model for community. The first of five distinctives in this model is intentional solitude, drawing away from the clan for time alone with the Creator. Second, this community called for each believer to have a companion in the journey, a anamchara (or "soul friend") who would be not a spiritual superior but a friend and peer who could nurture a safe place for transparency, vulnerability, accountability, support and challenge. From the one, to the two, to the three: the third element of this community was a mentor-led small group of fellow believers who would join in study and service. Fourth, the experience expanded to common life: meals, labor, Biblical teaching, prayer and worship. Finally, the impacts of these four aspects combined to compel each member of the community to interact with pre-Christians who had not yet understood the promise of the Gospel. While this fifth aspect of community may seem at first similar to contemporary expressions, an essential difference must be noticed. Modern methods of evangelism begin with a presentation of the Gospel story to those who may be no more than casual contacts. If successful, this effort leads to a decision for conversion. Upon conversion, the new believer is invited to community and fellowship. Hunter contends the Celtic approach is actually and appropriately an inversion of this conversion protocol. In the Celtic approach, the potential believer is first offered fellowship and hospitality, which lead to opportunity for service, ministry and authentic conversation. After this connection and commitment are built and trusted, the prospective Christian may choose belief and conversion based on the reality of relationship, leading to full inclusion in community. Certainly, Jesus' own practice was to call those who would be excluded from most modern Christian communities, never to be given an opportunity to discover His open invitation. (Luke 5:27-32).

Hunter is insistent that readers find within these ancient methods innovative avenues for reaching the "New Barbarians," those whose lifestyles seem unacceptable and unconventional, considered beyond reach by religious institutions tied to structure, tradition and presumed authority

Certainly, this reader agrees with the assessment Hunter discovered within the Australian Jesus Movement: the challenge is to see God's Kingdom "as a party -- where the doors are thrown open like an Irish pub to anyone who would come in." This "pub church" would be one where Patrick could be quite comfortable -- a church "festive, music, participatory."

Finally, a book that takes the interest in "celtic Christianity" that seems to be such the rave now and applies it to the modern church in a life-changing way. This book re-visions evangelism in a way that will reach out to people who haven't grown up in a church setting. Through his study of celtic Christianity, George Hunter saw an evangelism that does not expect people to live by the "rules" of Christianity before they are even accepted into the doors of a church. Looking at a group of Christians who reached out to the world around them and asked them to be "christian" and not "civilized" is true inspiration for us today when our churches seem to want people to know how to act before we are willing to even let them in the doors. This book is well worth the read for anyone interested in bringing Christ to their world.

In this book, Mr. Hunter has written an excellent thesis on Celtic Christianity. This is not light reading, but neither is it too heady for the average reader to understand.

The basic thesis of this book is an interesting study of the fifth century evangelization of Ireland by Patrick and how his methods may be effective in today's culture. Mr. Hunter does a fine job of educating the reader about the ways Patrick used to reach a barbaric, pagan nation with the Gospel using very non-traditional methods. He theorizes that in today's world, there is a generation of "New Barbarians" - people whose lives have never been influenced by Christianity and have no true Christian experience. As in the days of Patrick, the religious institutions have failed to make the Gospel highly relative to this culture.

He concludes his study by giving examples of specific churches and ministries who have adopted creative new methods of evangelizing this largely unreached generation and have succeeded. He also issues a moving challenge to Church leaders to make the necessary changes to bridge the gap between the Church and the unchurched and bring in this vast harvest of people who are searching for God in all the wrong places.

I found this book very helpful and encouraging. I highly agree with Mr. Hunter's thesis and join with him in issuing this challenge to the Church. As a pastor, I began making these changes in our church years ago, with some success. More recently, we have been introduced to ministry groups who are literally going into the darkest parts of this alienated culture, living among the people and sharing the good news of the Gospel. The fruit of their ministry is tremendous and has challenged us to go even further to make the Church a place where everyone who is seeking God is welcome, regardless of how "uncivilized" they may be.

Those churches who are bold enough to make this change will be rewarded with an army of passionate young warriors of the faith who will go anywhere and do anything to share the love of Jesus Christ in the streets. Buy this book if you are serious about reaching the lost. You won't regret it.

I enjoyed this book from cover to cover, and each topic in between. I read this book in just 2 days as it was hard to put down andI was eager to get to the next subject. I waspleased with the author's use scriptures as they pertained to the subject at hand, and condensing them to "layman's" terms and simple analogies. Not only a new way to think about or to view money, but a new understanding of myself, relationships with others and with God.

I can apply many of the strategies in this book to my business. Some things are common sense, but for the most part this book is full of great suggestions I might never have thought of.

The Rusty Charm is still alive in South Carolina. The trials, successes and failures of our early settlers are brought to life by James Goodman. What stands out in his book is the fortitude of the Dicks & O'Neale families and the ruthlessness of the British sympathizers. I have just read two of his books and hope his other works continue the adventures of the Silver Bluff settlers.

It is loaded with pictures, but the pictures and their descriptions do not tell all of the story. How did the US 74 bypasses at Shelby and KM changed Cleveland County? The answer: big time.

Avoid. This book appears to have quite a reputation, but despite being in its 2nd edition, it is riddled with errors. The book exhibits some fundamental misapprehensions about TCP/IP; as a result it perpetrates some astonishing misinformation, much of it quite basic. Partial list: the nature of a socket close operation; what IOException when closing a socket means; what happens when the listen backlog is exceeded; specification of the ServerSocket constructors; Nagle's algorithm (Socket.setTcpNoDelay); linger; keepalive; etc etc.

Of the examples which do work, the PortScanner and LocalPortScanner are provided in versions which perpetrate atrocities on the local machine and network by not closing sockets. Multi-homing very cursorily treated, not even indexed. Firewalls apparently treated in one page. Role of TTL in multicast apparently ignored.

The text is verbose and repetitive, and a number of the examples are irrelevant. Fully 50% of the Sockets for Servers chapter consists of a rather irrelevant excursion into HTTP and HTML; the examples have bugs, not that they have much point. Also, what pray have HTML rendering and parsing in Swing got to do with networking? 30 irrelevant pages on this; nice to have, but why here?

Author seems to think HotSpot is a JIT. Typos in the index, not encouraging. Many impending JDK 1.4 enhancements will shortly obsolete this book. Avoid it. For TCP/IP and UDP fundamentals, buy W.R. Stevens Unix Network Programming. -

Java Network Programming is a great topic and very challenging to write about. In the past decade, Client Server and Networking where the most popular topics in the industry.

Initially, Java was not an Internet/Web language oriented. Later versions, the language migrated into a more network oriented and became the language of choice among financial institutions, and others, because of its high productivity capabilities (mainly, shorter development curve.)

Here are a few points that I'd like to make concerning this book:

1.The authors took on themselves a very large assignment, rather than reducing the scope of the book, so they could deal efficiently with the content and represent it in more technical details and depth, just as O'Reilly publication does so often. The variety of topics discussed in the book could be topics for books themselves, such as Web Concepts, Threads, Java I/O...

2.A few topics are not directly affiliated with Networking, such as Threads, Java Mail API, etc. I was surprised to find the "HTML in Swing" chapter, which is a total shift from the Networking Layer to the Presentation Layer.

3.The book is missing important and advanced topics in Networking, such as IIOP, Distributed Objects, EJB and maybe CORBA. I was surprised to find a chapter about RMI - an old form of distributed objects, which was replaced by IIOP and EJB in recent years. RMI was combined with IIOP (RMI/IIOP) because its poor performance. Why would anyone want to study an old topic?

4.This book is lacking of a conceptual discussion about Networking Layers in general, to help users understand why with Java, Network Programming could be a piece of cake... Conceptually speaking, indeed, with Java it's a much easier task.

5.The bright spot here are the samples that are almost in a "copy and paste" condition. They are easy to understand and implement.

This book covers all the important things to know about network programming in JDK1.3 and Java2. The content and quality is how you expect it from O'Reilly books: thorough, complete, practical with clear examples, and with a good theoretic foundation.

The first three chapters provide theory about basic network and web concept and explains what you can do with Java networking. A lo of very interesting things, and that motivated me to read further. Chapter 4 and 5 are about Java I/O and threads and might be redundant for Java programmers, who already know basic Java stuff. But those chapters are necessary to understand the examples in all the following chapters. Chapter 6-19 deal with all the various networking topics and Java classes that deal with URL's, Internet addresses, sockets and datagrams, protocol and content handlers, RMI and JavaMail. The organization of these last chapters is topical; in most of the times you can understand a chapter without reading the previous ones, just pick out the one that you are interested in. (Interesting chapter about parsing HTML with JEditorPane, Swing has some unexpected applications!)

I think the author gave a complete and thorough coverage of all the necessary topics. The author does not stray from its topics, is sometimes a bit dry in his explanations, and gives some important side information, e.g. about security aspects of the different Java versions in regards to RMI.

Take in mind that this is the second edition from August 2000, updated to Java2, with some 200 or more extra pages, and we can use this book for the next couple of years.

This book is well written and informative. My favorite books are those that are written in such a fashion that the words flow from the page straight to my mind, do not past go, do not collect $200. This is such a book. There are a few typos, but the author mentions that corrections are available on his web site. Some reviewers failed to read the introduction to know this.

If you're an experienced OO programmer of a different programming language currently building your Java knowledge foundation, get this book!

First of all, this is not a reference, it explains the organization behind the I/O Library. If you are looking for a reference book to locate answers in under a minute this ISN'T the book for you, instead get 'Java in a Nutshell'. Second of all, this book helps you to learn the I/O classes by constructing a program that you modify throughout the book. If that will annoy you, don't get this book. Overall, I think this is a great book! It was well worth the investment. I had previously encountered I/O documentation in more broadly scoped Java books such as, Beginning Java, in other words not much detail. This book, however, blew me away with its detail, but it is presented in a very down to earth manner. In other words, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand what's going on. This book will take you from the top of the I/O class hierarchy and move you down into the specialized sub-classes. All the while explaining to you what each of the classes does and like I said before, a lot of supporting details. Best of all, this book helps you understand I/O by showing you how Sun logically organized the I/O Library. By the time you've finished the book it's much easier to understand how all of the classes come together to offer powerful I/O support. Before I read this book when I looked at the inheritance tree for the I/O Library my reponse was like "you've got to be kidding me! I'll never be able to get all of this down!". But after finishing this book I am in no way intimidated or confused by the I/O classes. Good luck!

For anyone who knows Java's core language and wants to know more about the many ways to perform I/O in Java, then look no further. This is the best book available on the subject hands-down. It covers all aspects of I/O, including encryption, zipping, and networking as well as big discussions on the basics such as console and file I/O. This book is very readable as well in that the author saves the book from being as boring as a book covering I/O can be. All in all, it's worth every penny.

I find this a hard book to swallow. Life has taught me that there are always more sides to the story then just one. To me this seems like a book written by a bitter ex-spouse who really just wanted to flame everyone that ever took some control from him. Hard to believe he could be so disrespectful to his deceased wifes daughter and her family. These people have suffered multiple losses and this seems a bit cold and un-christian response.

I just don't believe this is the whole story. Plus I think it is odd he gets married so quickly?

It is all too frightening to think that this could go on in The United States of America. A parent "losing custody" of his child to a non-biological parent because of a "psychological status"? An EX stepparent should not be allowed this much leeway into a former step child's life. Period. She wasn't awarded custody because she was a better parent. She was awarded custody by default. She sued and he wasn't there in court because he had not been properly notified. That's the American way and it needs changing. Not just in Oregon but in any other states where this is allowed and those of us who think it does not affect us need to let our state representatives know that this will not be tolerated. I know that there must be someone out there willing to rectify this situation and make it right.

I wonder if any of this book's detractors -- notably left anonymous -- ever actually make it to the back of the book, where there are reams of actual court documents supporting the author's claims! They might do well to start with the end and read their way back. The truth might surprise them...meanwhile, general, unbiased readers should have no problems drawing their own conclusions based on the author's low-key style and "speaks for itself" proof. A gripping read no matter which side of the custody fence you straddle...

Every score is a single staff melody with a smattering of guitar chords. I was disappointed that it did not include scores for the modern keyboard. Descriptions of sheet music should indicate the arrangement. I gave it two stars for its production value as a book and its interest to singers.

Civil war history comes alive through this songbook, which demonstrates music and lyrics for a variety of songs and styles of the times. The authors are folk singers and musicians as well as historians: Civil War Songbook presents sixty songs and an accompanying review of how they came to be. An accompanying CD is available, providing a companion to this excellent historical overview.