Ridiculous price for what is essentially a stiff magazine. The charts and graphs are pretty .. but are available free on Morningstar.com. As far as Mr. Weiner being the self-proclaimed #1 expert on Vanguard Funds? Well, John Bogle - the real expert and founder of Vanguard - says that anyone subscribing to Weiner's newsletter should ask for a refund. This magazine gives nice summaries and performance charts .. but nothing new or "expert." Most Vanguard diehards.. receive countless unsolicited invitations (or,uh, Junk Mail) to subscribe to Weiner's newsletter. Better for us to just ride the low-priced Vanguard funds for all they are worth, which is quite alot, and ignore all of Weiner's advice on buying, dumping, and tinkering with Funds on his hunches.

I think this book was too wordy for a text book. I believe this Accounting book should have had more examples and explanations of the examples to be able to work the problems at the end of each chapter. When you are trying to understand what the numbers really mean "which is the name of the book", I think you should go into more detail as to what the numbers really do mean and also how to get those numbers.

This wordy book on the 1992 Earth Summit was a reading requirement for a class I once took. Most people in the class did not finish it. Although the book presents several interesting ideas and important policy directives for global environmental problems, it loses the reader with overstated details. The ideas and goals presented look good on paper, but leave you scratching your head after reading them, asking yourself "how?" However, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of global environmental discussions and policy.

Well, despite the fact is quite minimally researched and cutely balanced, it is also wrong in the title. Whatever the newly rich petroleum states might want to say, the name of the body of water sorrounded from the south by the Arabian Penninsula, from the north by Iran, and from the west by the Strait of Hormuc is and has always been the PERSIAN Gulf. The Romans called it Sinus Persicus, and all around the world, it is known by that name, the Persian Gulf. It is NOT an ethnic case, it does not have to do with political domination (although that's what Arab States want). It is just A name!

I was looking for a book that would provide holiday plays that the Sunday school youth could perform during the Christmas season. This book contains mostly songs relating to a large variety of holidays throughout the year, not just Christmas. There were a couple of ideas presented that could be used for a childrens play, but they were very limited. The songs were OK, but are basically holiday type lyrics sung to familiar childrens songs.

This book is a very brief overview giving only minimal treatment to insects of real use. There are references to name brand products with no description as to what is in it. There are snippets from old books that are included to spice up the text--these are more interesting than the text. There are references to diagrams that must have been left on the cutting room floor.

Migliore claims to be a Barthian of sorts, but Barth would be appalled. The irony is that in Dr. Migliore's anxiety to escape any received traditions that might be man-centered and deeply intertwined with our (oppresive) human social orders, he has so gutted his theology that there is nothing transcendant left of it either. He classifies all the classic, ecumenical attributes of God (absoluteness, immutability, omnipotence, etc., see the rant on p.78, for example) as human metaphysical constructs, so in the end there is nothing left of God, at least not as he is revealed in Scripture.

Dr. Migliore knows his theology and has taught for over 30 years at (arguably) America's most prestigious mainline Protestant seminary (Princeton). You get the sense that the classic liberal/neo-orthodox models leave him wanting and empty, so he grasps for a political/social fad in hopes of finding something truly redemptive. Sort of pray he will try the timeless Gospel of grace instead, and find real, lasting 'liberation' there.

A better critique of Liberation Theology is by Ronald Nash.

Century 21 was written in 1968. The author makes optimistic predictions about life in the year 2001. A few are dead-on accurate, such as determining the sex of children before their birth. A few are conceivable, if you stretch your imagination; for example, he predicts the widespread use of happy pills (Prozac?). But most are just complete nonsense, which is what makes the book so amusing. However, hindsight only entertains for the first hundred pages or so, and the book becomes tiresome.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this book is the historical method used by the author to analyze the doctrine of Christ confessed in the early hymns of the Church. In this study Liderbach focuses on how these hymns shaped the doctrinal formulations of the Early Ecumenical Counsels (Nicea and Chalcedon in particular) and how the Counsels' Christological doctrines in return shaped the hymns of the Church. In this review we will primarily focus on his historical method. Liderbach wants to reflect on Christology "from below" that is on the result of "human awareness of the identity of Christ Jesus as experientially based" and expressed in the early Christian communities' hymns of worship (1). These expressions are expressions of the Spirit's leading and presence within the worshipping community. Central to Liderbach's historical methodology is his definition of the Rule of Faith. According to him "the Rule of Faith refers to the church's ancient criterion that the Spirit indicates genuine doctrine by directing the faithful community to believe as doctrine what it expresses in worship" (9). In this Liderbach follows the redefining of the Rule of Faith by John Henry Newman which saw "the communities' public acts-their liturgies, feasts and prayers" as "testimonies to the teaching of the Holy Spirit: the dogma that the Holy Spirit inspires emerges from the bosom of the church" (20). Therefore Liderbach states that the doctrines of the Church formulated as expressions of the belief held by the community of the faithful (like Christ Jesus is God and man and Mary as the mother of Christ was a virgin) "has been received from the source that many call tradition, but that others, including this author (Liderbach), name as the Spirit" (10). From this perspective even Martin Luther's principle of "sola scriptura" is deficient for the formulation of doctrine since "the biblical writers did not, indeed could not, exhaustively articulate the action of the Spirit who guides the community in diverse ways. The norm for belief is not scriptures, but the Spirit who is actively at work within the believing community. The community therefore needs to strive to discern, in the midst of the community's disagreements and polarities, the traces of the movement of the Spirit" (25). Hence it is clear that Liderbach replaces both tradition and Scripture, as the principal sources of doctrine. It is the Holy Spirit's guidance alone that is authoritative for the life of the Church. This has tremendous implications for the Church's formations of doctrine. Liderbach formulates the main implication as follows (30): "The Rule of Faith requires that all doctrine, not only the doctrine of Chalcedon, be open to possible reformulation. Doctrine can be considered as securely determined by the Spirit, continuing to inspire belief in that doctrine within the consciousness of the believing community. Yet the Rule demands of the church a sensitivity to the Spirit's working in the community's consciousness." Thus his definition of the Rule of Faith opens up the possibility to reformulate any previous doctrine. Nothing is closed to criticism according to "the Spirit's inspiration of the community". "If the church is to give itself the task of discovering the inspiration of the Spirit within the community of believers, it needs to turn to public acts of the community. The interrelationship of those public acts with the inspiration that the Holy Spirit has given to the community of believers must be used as the principle norm for the formulation of doctrine. Consequently one who critically reflects upon the validity of a particular doctrine, for example, the virginity of Mary, ... or Chalcedon's definition of the identity of Jesus, needs to discern how the community expressed its belief at the time those doctrines were formulated" (30-1). This is how Liderman uses the Rule of Faith as a hermeneutical principle, as a principle for historical reflection in the rest of the book to analyze the identity of Jesus as expressed in the hymns of the early Church (up to the eighth-century) to discern how the community expressed this doctrine before and after the Arian controversy. Liderbach's definition of the Rule of Faith and its implication are highly problematic. It is not that he wants all doctrine in principle to be open for reformulation that is problematic, but it is the way in which he wants the church to re-evaluate its belief that is so controversial. By making the Spirit's working within the communities consciousness which expresses itself in the public acts of the community the principle norm for the formulation of doctrine Liderbach places doctrine upon a very dubious and fluid foundation. It might work if the Church of Christ had only one expression (which is probably what Liderbach affirms being Roman Catholic) but in the twentieth century the Church of Christ expresses itself in many different ways which cannot be denied by anyone, and many of these expressions are very conflicting. Which of these expressions are the true expression of the Spirit? According to Liderbach's formulation of the Rule of Faith each different community would have different expressions of "truth" as they express the activity of the Spirit within the community. This criteria would also lead to the Church reformulating its doctrine every now and then as the Spirit moves them. This makes our doctrine and truth depend too much upon our own ability to discern the Spirit's working and leading. What we need is a fixed, objective point of authority by which to judge all our doctrine. The only objective authoritative source is the Holy Scriptures which is itself "God-breathed" (2 Tim. 3:16) and given by the Holy Spirit (cf. 2 Pet. 1:20-21). The only way in which the Spirit leads the community to formulate their doctrines is through the Holy Scriptures. When doctrine contradict the Holy Scriptures we must reformulate it. It is also a fallacy to pit the doctrine of "sola Scriptura" against the Spirit's leading since the Holy Spirit rules the Church through the word.

An ok general analysis of the theme of the city in literature but some major problems limit the interest of the book. The focus is largely on works written in English. There are only a handful of pages on Baudelaire, Balzac, Calvino, Dostoevsky; nothing on Kerouac and the Beats; a great deal on Eliot and Joyce that reads more like a summary of their work instead of an analysis of the role of the city in their work. The book's emphasis on Modernism also overplays the theme of alienation and the city, and almost completely ignores the element of cultural cross-pollination and creativity that can result from a stimulating urban milieu. By spending so much time on Eliot's "Four Quartets, " a reader might get the impression that there is nothing redeeming about cities and they only serve to grind down the masses with their impersonality and distance from nature.
This book is perhaps best suited for a bright high school student who is looking for a good frame in which to put some of their reading. Otherwise, head back to Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford and others. Good bibliography in here, however....