The only thing that Mr. Albert has accomplished in writing this book is that early on in the book he confesses to be a Christian. So then why does he proceed to write a book that proves beyond any doubt that he hasn't the slighest clue as to how someone becomes a Christian. This book blasphemes God and glorifies Satan as does any new age book.

This book was very interesting to say the least.It gave me new ways to look at life that seem to be very freeing. I would like to read more of this guy.

This is a book that I would recommend to anyone interested in discovering more about themselves and the world around them, regardless of religious background. Albert clarifies the methods by which people can sincerely improve themselves simply by taking a new and enlightening perspective on life and God. If you're ready to clear some fog from your own introspection and get to know yourself better, then be sure to grab this book! It reads smoothly from cover to cover and will be sure to leave a lasting impression.

As a figurative sculptor I know how to draw and I have been perusing various art books looking for an interesting new medium in which to draw. This book managed to convince me that oil pastels are just the thing.

John Elliot has included sufficient information in this book to allow an artist to work in this medium. This book contains a lot of practical advice on materials and oil pastel techniques. To integrate this information it contains six illustrated demonstrations that walk though a drawing from its beginning to its completion. In addition the book is well laid out and contains extremely numerous photographic illustrations.

Like most of today's "complementarians," John Piper has a lot of good things to say. Men should be devoted to the welfare of their wives. They should be spiritual leaders in the home. Women should honor their husband's attempts to provide for them.

That said, Piper misses the mark. He teaches that God designed creation so that Man was the ultimate authority, and that woman's created duty is merely to obey. As much as Piper tries to nuance this view with talk of husbands being "loving," the end result is that the husband still has the final say and the right to break his wife's will if they reach loggerheads.

The correct Biblical view is this: women are in an inferior position to men because our Fall from the Garden has cursed the world. The initial harmony between men and women has been ruined. Genesis teaches that there was no formal "hierarchy" between men and women before the Fall - all of the "complementarians" ingenius attempts to smuggle a master/servent dynamic into the pre-Fall relationship have fallen flat because their assumptions simply aren't apparent in the text. Therefore, man's rule over woman is part of a broken, cursed existence, just like the fact that there are masters and slaves. A Christian man is not to embrace and rejoice in his role as "leader." His job is to raise his wife up to a level of equal worth and personhood to himself, despite his culture's insistence that women are just jiggly sex toys. The complementarian model is flawed because it teaches men to relish their role as "head," and sees the main problem with gender relationships being women getting out of line.

John Piper delivers a carefully studied Biblical portrait of what it means to be a man or a woman. The principles are based on sound Biblical exegesis, but without a lot of technicality and detail. The chapters dealing with "The Meaning of Masculinity" and "The Meaning of Femininity" are dealt with by the use of carefully constructed definitions that are unfolded word-by-word. Extensive space is given to describing the masculine role of leadership. Piper's approach is Scriptural, and therefore relevant; and he labors hard to bridge any apparant gaps between the Biblical model and its contemporary relevance. He avoids hard and fast rules for specific circumstances, and sticks to sold principles which should govern male-female relationships of differing levels. This would be an excellent book for pastoral premarital counselling.

Piper manages to minimally flesh out the roles described in the Bible for man and woman, while remaining sensitive to the common "modern feminist" views without tiptoeing around the faults in that line of thought. Overall, a great summary of insightful redaction of scripture. Now I want to get the more complete book that Piper edited on this same subject.