Whoa! I was totally unfamiliar with the works of Oscar Wilde, until I bought this one on a friend's recommendation. It's huuuuuge, yet incredibly beautiful. Dorian Gray must be one of the greatest stories ever told, his poems are razor-sharp, his letters not less, and every line he comes up with is quotable. If you want to make sure you don't miss a thing, this is the book to get (and try his biography, especially the part about the trial).

Oscar Wilde wrote some of the most brilliantly crafted, witty plays of all time. Get this book and read everything in it! You're really missing out if you haven't read any of his work. His humor is so wicked and will have you cackling evilly at the genius of his dialogue. "The Picture Of Dorian Gray" is also one of the most unforgettable and captivating stories I've ever read. Highly recommended.

Oscar Wilde is one of my very favorite writers. He wrote some very interesting stories such as "The Picture of Dorian Gray". He also wrote very good dialogue. I place him second only to Shakespeare where the dialogue is concerned. Wilde also created well-developed and intriguing characters. I would highly recommend his works.

Maybe it was particular programming and training, or just personal personality and temperment, but I found it initially difficult to read through the contributions of those holding forth multiculturalists, feminists, and post-modernist perspectivest. The essays by those who seemed more traditionalists (e.g. the Jewish theologian Jacob Neusner, the late, feminist, philosopher Jean Hampton, the church historian, Martin Marty, and the legal scholar Mark Schwehn) were initially more appetizing than those by apparent reformists - those who could insightfully address the perspectives of the cultural and academic avant-garde. But, in reading the last two, integrative, essays (by Paula Brownlee and Dennis O'Brien) and upon re-reading the Introduction by Hoekema and the Afterward by Fong, this particularistic, Calvinist finally saw the light - the value and importance of real dialog, communication, and listening to the others.

In the essays, Marty is particularly insight! ful about the multiplicity of cultures present in American society and urges Christians to be "modal" and "modular." Wayne Booth's exposition on the way postmodernism has "restored religious inquiry to respectable status in many academic fields," was quite eye-opening. He even holds forth similarity between deconstructionalists and religious pluralists. Hampton outlines the debates between herself and several of her antagonists and then sagely illustrates how to engage in "productive" fighting, which corresponds to Elizabeth Minnich's call to be "both located and open, different but relational, in a small but public space..."

I approached this book looking to find tempered and polished strategies to "transform or convert culture by Christ," along the lines of what H. Richard Niebuhr championed in his book, Christ and Culture. To this end I was disappointed. And, I was initially frustrated by the numerous diver! se and foreign voices identified in our present culture. H! owever, I finished with a clear sense of what is now needed - to listen carefully, to share narratives, and to refuse settling for premature unity.

In the Afterword, Fong brings up the Greek story of Proteaus, wherein Menelaus must embrace and hold the shape-shifter through all of its morphs before it yields it secrets of the future. Fong then associates it with the story of Jacob and the angel of the Lord wrestling, and urges Christians to wrestle with and, in so doing, embrace the many shape-shifting particularities of present culture. I say that this collection of essays at least aids in showing Christians what is needed in praying for and witnessing to these particularities - until the Lord allows them to wrestle with Him.