Saint The Books

This is a great book that depicts the entire 2006 New Orleans Saints football season. The pictures are wonderful and the story was written very well. I bought it as a birthday present for my husband and he LOVED it.

Excellent book. Great item to remember the Saints amazing 2006 season for years and years to come. I look forward to next year's book about the Saints Super Bowl Championship.

This book was awesome!!!! I have been a Saints fan for many years, through the good and the bad. The 2006 season was awesome. This book is a great recap of a wonderful season for the New Orleans Saints. It has a week by week analysis of each game of the 2006 season. This is a great gift for a New Orleans Saints fan.

Geaux Saints!!!!!

This book puts the history of this region in a soft light. From Fischer to Foster the South has been analyzed and memorialized, but Bowles will make you smile about it all with his interviews and anecdotes. Natives will recognize many of the characters and the "immigrant" will want a permanent visa after reading this rich narrative.

If you are a southerner, a political junkie, or doing research on the Old South (the one that existed between The War of Northern Aggression - excuse me, the Civil War - and approximately 1975)...you'll love this book. I did.

A must-read for any fan of politics and the characters who run the machine. Bowles and Tyson weave a yarn on par with the cast of good ol' boys they profile.

The raft works great. I was a little afraid when I saw how long it was. The description wasn't descriptive enough. But, when I received and tried it out it worked out just fine.

If you have read this book you know what I am talking about these are some of the greatest books you could possibly read in parallel to the letters written by paul. Get your hands on the first century diaries!

What a great way to get to know Paul and his companions. This book keeps your attention and at the same time you learn the personalities of Paul, Peter, Silas and others! After reading this and the other diaries, go back and read the actual letters to the churches in the Bible. They will come alive! A Great Book!

This book is a great tool for beginning to live the life as christ would like us to. The spiritual thinking on our part and the soul searching is awsome. I would recomment this book to anyone looking to enhance your life as God as intented us.

This book delivers! Easily understood and wastes no words, it gets to the point from first to last page. Will never be without it.
Br. Ross, FFR+

As a non-Catholic, I find Francis of Assisi fascinating as a man who gave up the life he knew, with all its privileges, to live with as little as possible so as to serve the people as Christ did. So I was happy to find this easy-to-read book.

The book is divided into different sections consisting of ÒreflectionsÓ, which are what normal people call ÒchaptersÓ.

The first section is called the ÒFoundationÓ which is, as the authors put it, ÒJesus Christ and no other.Ó That says it all, doesnÕt it? Each reflection, such as ÒThe Grace of ChristÓ, ÒThe Real ChristÓ, ÒJesus Visible TodayÓ, ÒMary, Our Mother and ModelÓ, explains the different roles Christ plays in the Franciscan life.

The second section covers ÒConversionÓ, the painful process we must endure if we are to throw away our old ways and adopt a new attitude. This is explored in reflections such as ÒPenance: Turning to God and Away from SinÓ, ÒThe Poverty of ChristÓ, ÒThe Poverty for the KingdomÓ (easily the hardest part of the conversion process), ÒHumility Toward OthersÓ, ÒA Life of ChastityÓ (possibly the second hardest), and ÒYouth, Hope for the FutureÓ.

The third section is a group of reflections on prayer. I found information here that hasnÕt been explained by anybody else as plainly before. You get into what is prayer, whatÕs it for, what are the ingredients? Then it goes into what I call the ÒCatholic elementsÓ of liturgy and Eucharist.

The fourth set of reflections teaches the role of those who call themselves apostles, which we can do if we follow Jesus and help others do so as well. You learn how to see Christ in others, how to represent Christ to others (a personal Jesus, if you will), how to love ALL people, what is the role of family (however defined), whatÕs really involved in forgiveness, what exactly do we mean by ÒjusticeÓ (important this day and age), how to be a peacemaker, what is consumerism doing to the environment we are charged with caring for, what is the role of work, how are we to regard those with illnesses, and what perfect joy is all about.

At the end of each reflection, there are instruments for further study. You find questions for reflectionÓ to see if you understood the chapter, important Òapplications to daily lifeÓ, a prayer thatÕs relevant to the discussion, and you are also given scriptural and other references for each ÒreflectionÓ.

By the end of the book you will have enough basic knowledge of what itÕs like to truly live as Francis lived to be able to decide whether to study further or abandon it. ItÕs a small book that can be covered in two afternoons. ItÕs a very plain-spoken book that opened my eyes about what devout religious life is all about.

As for me, I would have liked to have seen more mentioned about the other woman in FrancisÕ life, Clare of Assisi, and the roles of women in general in Franciscan life. Also, the book calls itself a guide to secular Franciscans, and that membership in the Catholic Church is required for Secular Franciscan Order. I take exception to that.

After all, what is being a Franciscan is all about? On the outset it means patterning your beliefs after those of the legendary Francis of Assisi, but in reality you are simply patterning your life after Christ. And you shouldnÕt have to join the Catholic Church or any other form of organized religion to do that.

So, to live as Francis lived is to live as Christ lived. CHRIST, not the hateful, misogynist, homophobic, and full-of-himself self-appointed apostle Paul. If I may paraphrase from the first chapter, as a friend of Francis your purpose is to respond to GodÕs love with TOTAL love of your own. This book puts you well on the path of doing just that, if you open your mind to what it has to say. Highly recommended.

This book gives a first person perspective on what the civil war meant to one union supporter who had a law office in St. Louis, but later left to avoid the conflicts in Missouri. Well done!

This book is an authentic, first person account of the Civil War situation in Missouri from 1861 to 1865. It is taken from the hand written journals of Franklin Archibald Dick, and compiled by his great,
great granddaughter, Gari Carter.

The journals are an amazing, new and primary source of information on the Civil War. They are his personal notes on the War, the U.S. economy and global politics of the era. He was a perceptive attorney and Union officer, and recorded his day-to-day experiences in the Troubled State Journals

If you want a close-up account of the Civil War story in the state of Missouri, directly from a man who was there, read this book.

Troubled State: Civil War Journals of Franklin Archibald Dick is a collection of private journals written by Franklin Archibald Dick, a St. Louis attorney, Union officer, and provost marshal general. Assiduously assembled by Franklin Dick's great-great-granddaughter Gari Carter, Troubled State offers a firsthand view of historical events such as the early Camp Jackson incident (during which he was Captain Lyon's assistant adjutant general). Dick was concerned about the slow progression and horrendous cost of the civil war; witnessing the divided city of St. Louis broke his heart, and journals reflect his progression from optimism to grave doubts about the future. Thoughtfully annotated and supplemented with brief biographies as well as a family genealogy and bibliography, Troubled State is a welcome addition to Civil War primary source shelves.

Of all the translations that have been done of this book, this one is the absolute best! Some translations use lots of 'Thees' and 'Thous', others paraphrase so much you can't even recognize the original meaning, while others add so much in commentary that you would think the reader incapable of forming his or her own opinion... this one lets St. Louis de Montfort speak for himself - how refreshing and how proper, when dealing with a writing of one of the greatest Marian saints of all time! I give this book my highest recommendation!

In True Devotion to Mary, St. Louis de Montfort provides a stunningly convincing treatise on why all Catholics should put Mary at the center of their search for a deeper relationship with Jesus. This translation does an excellent job at bringing St. Louis words to life for our generation and beyond. I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to read this quintessential work on Marian devotion.

Whether you read this translation, another translation, or the original French version, this book has the potential to change your life forever. I consecrated myself to Mary in 1995, and my life began to change the next day...

True Devotion to the Virgin Mary is the surest way to become a Saint. She is our Heavenly Queen and our Guiding Star who will lead us through this life and safely home to Heaven, if only we submit ourselves completely to her. True Devotion is the best way to do this!

Buy this book!

I have often pondered what questions I would ask if given a chance to talk with one of the faithful Apostle's. What was Jesus like in the flesh? What was it like to see him perform the many wonderful miricles. Now I know. Tuesdays with Matthew answers those questions and many more. A must read.

I have often thought of sitting on my "back porch" in heaven, having conversations with those who walked side-by-side with Jesus. This unique book brings it to light for me. It's a real page-turner that I didn't expect. The author has the ability to tackle weighty topics (like prayer, faith, failure, love) in a fictional framework that makes it easy to understand. I highly recommend you read it.

A fast paced read that pulled me along and made it impossible for me to put it down. Tuesdays with Matthew touched and inspired me, toyed with my mind and my heart. Read it aloud to my wife, then to my mother and they were enthralled as well. I recomend it highly.

Terry Burns
author of "To Keep a Promise" and "Don't I Know You?"

For those familiar with William Barclay's excellent NT commentaries these follow in that same pattern. In a simple, yet surprisingly comprehensive, manner they explain the purpose, meaning, and application to our lives of biblical texts. These are valuable resources for clergy and lay persons alike. I heartily recommend this series and this volumne in particular.

According to Andrew Hill and John Walton, this is "insightful theological analysis and contemporary application" of the prophets' messages. This commentary series can be hit and miss regarding rigorous scholarship, but the work on the 12 prophets seems to be better than some of the other volumes. Note that this is a two volume set to get all 12 prophets. On Zechariah the commentary does a good job with eschatology.

This commentary covers the last 7 of the minor prophets. It and its companion volume 1 (on the first 5 minor prophets) are a splendid help for anyone who wants to read these prophets as God's word for us. Craigie gives us the historical background for the books and relates them to our lives today. The commentary is full of pithy observations worth remembering. These volumes are more interestingly written and useful than several of the other volumes of the Old Testament Daily Study Bible that I have used.

Another VERY interesting book from Larry Millett - I couldn't put it down, lots of fun and great comparison pictures. Brings back a lot of memories!

I'm reading this book for Augsburg College's history of the Twin Cities. I think the photography is first class and I love reading this book. It is one of few class reading I enjoy (as well as Larry Millett's Lost Twin Cities). Lewis Nelson

I thought this book was very interesting, and not at all something that would appeal only to Minnesotans. It's sometimes hard to remember just how rapidly the neighborhoods and infrastructure of American cities have changed in the last hundred years, and seeing the movement documented is really fascinating. As the authors point out in an early chapter, nothing in a city is permanent, sometimes not even the streets themselves. The book does have some unhappy overtones. Like other cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul have chosen at times to simply bulldoze seedy areas of town and fill them with bland new buildings rather than try to redevelop them. New is not always better, for the city or its inhabitants. It's sad to see a block of aging but still beautiful turn-of-the century commerical buildings give way to cold-looking open spaces, or a stately mansion lawn turn into a weed-choked hillside behind a college. But this book is excellent whether you are interested in social commentary or just amazed at how quickly cities change to meet our changing needs.

Ever since Harold Bloom's brilliant The American Religion was published, a difficult stalemate in Mormon studies has at least been partially broken. Mormon apologists and their anti-Mormon adversaries have always shot at each other like World War I armies engaged in trench warfare, trying to prove or disprove what is ultimately empirically and secularly unverifiable. Bloom's great insight was to examine Mormonism as a rhetorical system -- critically examining the doctrine as an intellectual construct within the context of American culture. He (and eventually many others) were surprised by just how attractive, encouraging, and quintessentially American Mormon doctrine really is. (And maybe this surprise will have the side effect of inducing sympathetic outsiders to take our truth claims more seriously.)

Other scholars are beginning to follow Bloom's lead. Terryl L. Givens' The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, myths, and the Construction of Heresy is a small gem of Mormon historiography and cultural criticism. The first half of the book is a tour-de-force recounting of Mormonism's eruption into 19th-century American consciousness. Because Jackson-era Americans were unable to admit they could not tolerate a new, home-grown religion (because of American constitutional doctrine of official religious tolerance), Givens says they recast their conflict with the upstart Mormons by stereotyping members of the new church as sinister, "Oriental" despots The second half of the book documents the construction of this image of Mormon heresy through 75 years of anti-Mormon fiction. These books were very successful commercially and in molding public opinion, Givens says, because of the newness of the "novel" as a genre and a new, vastly expanding reading audience willing to be sexually titillated by lurid tales of polygamy. (Many of these novels sound similar to the sensational made-for-TV movies that glut television network schedules. The more things change . . .)

Here we meet the lustful, cunning Mormon elder with his hypnotic powers (Americans were unable to admit that anyone, especially women, would join the church of their own free will: they had to be Mesmerized.) Some of us have seen the camp, amusing old silent movie Trapped by the Mormons. The evil missionary "Isoldi Keene" comes straight out of these anti-Mormon novels. The movie is pretty funny by today's standards: only later, after it's over do you reflect how similar this stigmatizing of Mormons as "the Other" is to anti-Semitism.

The final chapter details the Mormon public image in the 20th century. Occasionally you will find traces of the old stereotype, like the infamous 1993 episode of the CBS television series "Picket Fences" where a Mormon splinter group engages in polygamy with young girls. Givens points out how this gives the creators of the show the opportunity to strut their lofty liberal tolerance, while at the same time once again appealing to the prurient interests of the audience. But nowadays, Mormons appear in the work of Cleo James, Tony Kushner and John le Carre mostly as repressed, intolerant nerds -- this time displaying too much conformity, rather than too little as in the past.

What makes Givens' book so fascinating is the contrast between Mormon and ant-Mormon rhetorical style. While critics of the church engaged in slander and vituperation (a U.S. Senator seriously discussed on the Senate floor the human sacrifices he said went on in the temples), the Mormons tried to model themselves on what they considered original Christianity. Givens cites Truman Madsen and Hugh Nibley (how odd and refreshing to find them in a scholarly work published by a non-Mormon press) in explaining how fruitless and hypocritical the charge of "heresy" was and is. The only thing that separated Joseph Smith and St. Paul was that Smith was a contemporary of his critics and not cushioned by 1800 years of historical distance. As Tom Wolfe once said, "A cult is a religion without political power." And in the case of the Mormons, newness combined with relative powerlessness attracted enemies.

This is a stimulating and original book. It has certain functionalist/postmodern elements, like Bloom, but Givens keeps the jargon to a minimum and retains great readability.

1. Inquisition: The heretic has always been a much graver threat to spiritual solidarity than the infidel. The fires of the Inquisition scorched the lapsed Christian or deviant believer, not the professing Jew or the Muslim.
2. Authority: If the believer accepts whatever is as origin or primary, then anything else is schism or apostasy from the primal, sanctioned order, and authority may legitimately identify and censure such deviance wherever it occurs.
3. Enlightenment: Doctrines peculiar to the LDS: 1. Miracles can be wrought by faith 2. Special revelations are now being given to men through Prophets, Seers, and revelators. 3. The nature of God is not a mystery. Givens says, "Mystification is a concomitant of such discontinuity and is the very heart of Christian tradition." Charles Dickens says Mormonism can be seen as "the refusal to endow its own origins with the mystic transcendence, while endowing those origins with universal import since they represent the implementation of the fullest gospel dispensation ever." "The typical Mormon conception of a miracle is that the miraculous event, though entirely natural, is simply not understood."
4. Republican values: Given the American tradition of innovation and independence and hostility towards authoritarianism and conformity, the attacks on Mormon heresy seem odd. What weight or legitimacy does a label like heresy have in a Democratic society? In American society every Christian doctrine has been widely debated and discussed. Debate, forums, freedom of speech has been fundamental rights protected by Republican government values. "Christians have argued, often passionately, over every conceivable point of Christian doctrine from the filioque to the immaculate conception" . Stephen Robinson states, Mormons are labeled heretics for "opinions and practices that are freely tolerated in other main stream denominations." Freedom of Religion protected and guaranteed religious tolerance and reduced heretical persecutions by a religious governmental entity.
5. Sphere of religion: George Q. Cannon claimed, "the pure Gospel was lost because of propagation, for centuries, by so-called Christian ministers, of the soul destroying and damnable heresy that God cannot or will not speak to man again from the heavens; that God will not reveal his will, send his angels, or exercise his power in the affairs of earth as much as he did in ancient days." Givens says, "What takes Mormonism out of the sphere of religion may be driven by external than internal factors; the shift may be as much a function of rhetorical strategies and political imperatives as it is a consequence of some morphological or sociological evolution". Illinois politicians feared LDS political power. Missourians feared fictional slave revolt myths. Anti-Mormon paralleled many of the same tactics as anti-catholic strategies in the early 1840s. Governor Boggs executive order read in part, as follows, "Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state...Their outrages are beyond all description. If you can increase your force, you are authorized to do so, to any extent you many think necessary...You will proceed immediately to Richmond and there operate against the Mormons." At Far West, the mob had 4,000 men camps nearly with orders from Boggs to exterminate the Mormons. A treaty at Far West allowed the saints to surrender and leave the State.
6. The Christian orthodoxy beliefs are as follows: 1. the Bible as inspired scripture 2. God as a creator 3. Christ as divine redeemer of mankind. Mormonism does not challenge these fundamental tenets claiming the Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly, Jesus Christ atoned for sin and broke the bands of death through resurrection and Christ is the creator. What Mormonism did challenge was the notion that God spoke to man through prophets, that a great apostasy removed God's authority from the earth, and that a restoration was required; and God reveal new canonical utterances recorded as modern scripture.

Have you ever wondered at the character of hate and prejudice in a society that claims to revere diversity? Terryl Givens uses the Mormon experience to explain how that happens, and specifically demonstrates the role of fiction in exacerbating persecution.

The book is the result of obvious exhaustive research, and is well put together, the arguments clear and concise. It is, however, a scholarly effort in both approach and language. Keep your dictionary handy. You may need it.

I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and recommend the book to Mormons and non-Mormons alike. It's very interesting.

Dorothy Peterson