I read Linzey's book, "Animal Gospel," in which he laid a good theological basis for humane care of animals and the practice of vegetarianism. However, he did not adequately address certain issues which were pressing to me. These included God giving Noah permission to eat meat, God providing a garment of skin for Adam and Eve, the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, Jesus eating meat and Paul's arguments against vegetarianism. Richard Young does and excellent job addressing all of these and other issues. He approaches each issue and question with straight forward honesty. Frequently, I felt as if he brought up an issue with which there was not good vegetarian response. However, he would address how it is normally read, frequently in complete agreement with the traditional reading of the passage, but then very gently present a fresh perspective.

Some Christian vegetarian groups use dubious historical documents to "prove" that Jesus and/or his disciples were vegetarian. Young does nothing of the kind, in fact, he debunks those attempts. He is very honest and straightforward in presenting his case.

I would strongly recommend this book for the Christian who is struggling with animal rights and vegetarianism from a Biblical perspective. If a Christian is not struggling with these issues, perhaps they should and this book would be a good place to start.

Dr. Young is much more than a relevant contemporary Christian, he is also an exceptional theologian, scholar/teacher of the Greek New Testament, and lives very much what he teaches. He was my Greek professor nearly 20 years ago and I must say his literary work has taken on a distilled wisdom. Best wishes to all who read his work.

M. Williams

One of the most important things about this book is that it does NOT, I repeat NOT, try to reinvent Jesus as a vegetarian. There have been some attempts to try to "prove" Jesus was vegetarian, but the author finds the evidence for such reinventions to not be compelling. The author basically concludes that some consumption of meat is biblically acceptable, so long as the animal has been treated with care and compassion during its life. On the other hand, the author also concludes that vegetarian is preferred, and factory farming would have to be contemptable in God's eyes. By the way, I'm personally an agnostic, and one of the reasons why I have turned away from Christianity is that the Christian church, in general, does not see the obvious truth to the immorality of factory farming. This book is must reading.

This is not the grammar one should first reach for in most areas. Daniel Wallace's grammars hold pride of place out of those that are most current. When one compares this grammar to those, there are reasons why this should not be preferred over Wallace.

1) Young has an interesting, and odd, tendency to list only the English translation of passages that aremeant as a Greek grammatical example. thus one has to find the passage to see if his usage is accurate.

2) He changes terminology from that which is commonly used by other scholars. thus one has to get used to his own (idiosyncratic) usages and then compare them against the "normal" usages.

3) He often included exegetically debated texts as his prooftexts for particular usages, and then does not say that they are debatable.

All of these devalue the usage of this grammar. Also he follows speech act theory very closely. which means he not only sees the aorist as not having a time aspect, but rarely sees time aspect mattering in tense at all. However, one should consider the fact that an author in any language can use a verb in an alternate tense to make it more vivid or to bring about a point. This does not invalidate a rule, because one has to know the normal usage to expect the abnormal one.

Where this grammar is most useful is in preposition and conjunction usages. His compiled lists of common usages for conjunctions and prepositions save frequent trips to the lexicon. They also represent the one area of clear superiority over even Wallace's "Beyond the Basics."

Richard Young has a superb job of giving the student of the Greek New Testament a grammar that is a worthy successor to Dana and Mantey. Although it is not as massive as Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics, Young's treatment is an ideal choice for one who is seeking to use his Greek to interpret the New Testament. Using a linguistical model, Young goes beyond the traditional approaches of sentence-based studies of the surface structure of the Greek language. He presents a broader picture of communication that examines both the language of the Greek New Testament and how its meaning is influence by its literary and situational contexts. A must-have for anyone wishing to do exegesis.

Mirrorstone is a good book that my son & I enjoyed reading. The illustrations are really superb. The story line is good and gripping at times. My son (7 yrs old) liked the book, but I thought that while the story was good, it could've been improved upon and little more thought through.
The storyline is about a modern boy who was brought into the past to retrieve the mirrorstone (magical mirror). Without giving too much of the plot, I think that given the basic storyline and the characters created to fullfill that story line, there could've been much more room for character development.
But even said all that, I thing that this book is one of the better "non chapter" books for young children. The illustrations are breath-taking (even as adult I enjoyed looking through the book), the holograms are really well done, and the story line, while not very complex, still point certain things out to the children.