Very easy to use. Open airy text. Well defined formulas and examples provide clear instruction on how to perform each test.

The chapters are very easy to read and understand. Each chapter includes exercises to do after each new concept is explained. Most answers to the exercises are included in the back of the book. The step-by-step instructions make concepts and exercises user friendly. A great Stats book.

Tinder's book is a thought-provoking foray into what the prospect of a thoroughly Christian hope (centered in the breaking in of God's kingdom) does for the individual, community, and political arena. He culls resources from thinkers such as Plato, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Marx, examining how their perspectives mesh or conflict with human hope for a destiny that finally comes to end history. He takes up the spiritual discipline of suffering as a means of focusing not on the penultimate, but upon the ultimate. He examines what situational obedience has to do with recognition of human finitude within history. All of these ideas, while important on a grand scale, will cause the serious reader to reflect on his or her own despondency--do we know what real hope is?

This outstanding contribution to scholarship in the history of law and religion analyzes the interplay between Christian theological norms and Western legal principles in family life. Departing from Voltaire's quip that the Christian family is either "a little church, a little state, or a little club," John Witte, Jr., Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics at Emory University School of Law examines the theology and law of the family in the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, and Enlightenment traditions.

The account begins with the development of the medieval Catholic canon law of marriage in an effort to combat the phenomenon of "secret marriage." Indeed, Witte reveals that prior to the systematization of the canon law and the sacraments, couples could proclaim themselves to be married with none of the public ceremonies, present witnesses, and festive celebrations that would become the classic wedding accoutrements in subsequent centuries. Given the disarray of the canon law and the sacramental system before this medieval synthesis, any couple who thought they were married probably were married.

The social and covenantal dimensions of marriage replaced the sacramental dimension as the hallmarks of the theology of the family in the Protestant Reformation, which Witte examines in its Lutheran and Calvinistic expressions. It was in this era that many of the trappings of the modern wedding, such as witnesses and church ceremonies, came into existence. The Anglican tradition encompassed the sacramental, social, and covenantal models in a commonwealth model that linked the common good of the couple, their children, the church, and the state in a model that became increasingly egalitarian and democratized, tracking political progress within the British commonwealth.

The ironic result of the development of marriage law and theology in the Christian West is that the move toward greater regulation and publicity in the Catholic, Reformation, and Anglican traditions was eventually largely overturned by the Enlightenment notions of contract and rights. Marriage came to be conceived largely as a private and completely voluntary contract--a bargain struck seemingly at arm's length by parties seeking the most intimate of associations. The Enlightenment model is, in essence, the model that is our legacy in the present day. It is this journey from sacrament to contract that characterizes marriage in the West and has led us to where we are today in the law and lore of marriage and family. Witte's work is a remarkable chronicle of the social practices, legal doctrines, and theological foundations encountered along the way.

I really like this book. In many ways it is a book about how institutions change. Dr. Witte has simply decided to focus on tax institutions. He begins with a discussion of incrementalism, or the idea that very often-large changes cannot occur all at once. He then puts this into context within the academic theories of the best tax.

The bulk of the book though is historical. Through economic history, Dr. Witte, discusses the forces of ideology, interest, and pragmatism that shape tax policy. He shows that these forces affect both the tax rules and the meta-rules that shape them. [The history is very clear, although an historian might note that Witte tends to rely on secondary sources.] Finally, Witte notes that because have institutional structures that prevent anything but marginal changes, we are unlikely to get an ideal tax no matter how defined.

I would recommend this book strongly for people who are doing this type of research. My only complaint is that I would have preferred to see more discussion of the political entrepreneurs who shape the changes.

As its modest dimensions would suggest, Witte's book is meant to be a quick overview of judicial attitudes towards religious freedom in the United States, instead of a comprehensive history. The author does a marvelous job of consolidating the varied factors that have gone into the current stare decisis in First Amendment religion jurisprudence. Witte has a very readable style, and this book would hold the interest of the casual reader while serving quite well as a text book for classes on the subject.

Contrary to its title, this book devotes only a dozen of its 221 pages to "the market approach to education." The rest of the book tells the story of the tiny pilot voucher program operating in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: how the legislation was written and passed, what evaluations conducted by Witte and others have found; and ruminations over the future of this and other voucher programs.

Witte's evaluation of the Milwaukee choice program is good to have in the library of serious school reform advocates, but it has been superceded by Paul Peterson and his colleagues at Harvard. Serious students of choice will find the rest of this book frustrating for several reasons.

Witte's writing style is imprecise and often marked by the use wrong words, so it is difficult to know just what he means. The worst offenses of this kind occur when he tries to discuss markets, since he seems unfamiliar with the basic vocabulary of economics. For example: "Thus while the pure market model provides an extreme case of stratification, universal vouchers will clearly increase current stratification and subsidy upward [sic] in the income stream [sic]." (207)

Witte's table of features that distinguish private from public schools bears a closer resemblance to something that might appear in a seventh grade civics textbook than something produced by a writer familiar with public choice literature. Even elementary insights from microeconomics are missing: He cannot believe anyone would "open a school in the ghetto" under a voucher system, apparently unaware that profit margins could easily be as high or higher in privately run inner-city schools than in affluent suburbs.

Witte's objections to "the market approach to education" come down to his assertion, often repeated but never substantiated by data or even good rhetoric, that vouchers would lead to "more stratified schools," by which he variously means more segregated, less equally funded, or less accessible to students from middle- and lower-income families. Given the "savage inequalities" of current government school systems, it is a weak and conflicted claim to make.

Witte's book can be divided into two main areas for critique. The first is the credible presentation of fact-based information. The second and less legitimate section is Witte's advocacy of the voucher program.

In its straight-forward, relatively unbiased assessment of the voucher program in Milwaukee, The Market Approach to Education serves as a useful resource to educational study. Witte presents conclusions about the program based on empirical research conducted in the first years of the its existence. Although there are tables and graphs, the information contained within the writing is completely understandable and intersting. In other words, the book is not a trail of numbers even though it presents a substantial amount of factual information.

A main source of inconsistency lies in Witte's personal conclusions and serves to discredit his argument. Witte claims to support the limited voucher program on the basis that it has the potential to aid students from disadvantaged areas. However, the evidence Witte presented seemed to suggest that private schools were no more shielded from the problems of education than the public schools, and that private schools yielded no better results than did public schools. Thus, why would he argue in favor of these targeted vouchers if they do not seem to realize their intent? Additionally, Witte states and reiterates that governmentally instituted programs which are initially targeted at a specific group of people, once deemed successful, are expanded to be implemented universally. Witte argues that this universal implementation would destroy the goals of the targeted vouchers: to work toward a more equitable system of education. The universal voucher system, Witte argues, would result in a stratification of education along socio-economic lines, just as all other commodities are economically stratified. Seeing this as contrary to the goal of educational vouchers, why would Witte support the targeted plan? His argument is somewhat schizophrenic. He, in fact, recognizes this, but does not offer any means to qualify his stance. For this reason, Witte's book loses some merit.

Where its value lies is the information contained within on the effects of the voucher system and the presentation of the potential outcomes of the program.