Saint The Books

St Therese is a saint for our times. She sees through our solid minds into the transparency of our deepest longings. This book is the very best of the short books. In this book we find only Therese, not a great deal of material about a lesser author.
Al Rossi

If you are looking for inspiration in your daily life this book will deliver. St. Therese inspires within the reader the ability to tackle life's daily mishaps with grace and great reverence for our Lord Jesus Christ. It is through this book the reader will learn how to live the way St. Therese did through small acts of love and kindness that go unnoticed by man but not by God.

Consiglio vivamente a tutti di leggere l'autobiografia di Santa Teresina, scritta per obbedienza, in cui si trova la picola via della perfezione.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When my daughter's daycare class started exploring volcanoes last fall I really wanted to get a good book on volcanoes to help me explain them to her well. This book was one of the most recommended books on the subject that amazon carried so it was a natural choice. That it explores the devastation wrought by Mt. St. Helens' 1980 eruption was all the better since we had just visited the area a couple months before.

Well, instead of the book going to the daycare for sharing it's stayed home as a bedtime book. I typically just sort of narrate the very good images in the book and when she asks a question I refer to the text around that image for more information.

The book has fantastic photos of the area (rivers, lakes, trees standing and just utterly blasted away, as well as plants and animals returning to the area) before and after the eruption. There is no photo capturing any human or animal suffering but the billowing ash and smoke was enough to worry my 5-year-old a bit - she certainly understood what those pictures meant.

The text is, in some ways, even better than the photos because it provides a great deal of introductory terms from geology and other physical sciences without being too boring or too difficult for a parent to supplement on the fly.

"Volcano" is an excellent way to explain what volcanoes are and what they can do as well as how the earth is resilient, continually changing, and perhaps can appear serene and whole when just a few short years ago (even within my daughter's father's lifetime!!) the land looked barren and gray.

This book about Mount St. Helens is really good. It give you alot of information about the silent, still, big and sleepy giant - Mount St. Helens. This sleepy giant was built by many eruptions over thousands of years. The pictures of the mountain are great because they show images before the eruption with green land all over and then after with just molten lava. How the earth spill the hot (magma) rock from inside. A volcano can be very destructitive to the land. The photograph shot from the helicopter shows very little life left like the moon after the explosion from the volcano on the mountain sides. Can you image how beautiful Mount St. Helens was before the eruption and destruction?

This nonfiction book is about volcanoes. It tells about the events leading to the erruption of Mount St. Helens. It describes, in exciting detail, the actual erruption and the eventual rebirth of the volcano. The photographs are great. They help to tell the story along with the words so that you can get a feel for the total destruction and devastation caused by the erruption. The nice thing about the story is that it also includes the rebirth of the volcano and tells of a life cycle that can never be broken.

Just wanted to state that I agree with those above. Very handy tool, especially when looking for quotes for talks.

The soft-back version of this book is a handy hand-held reference book. The format is topical, with several quotes elaborating on the various headings. It is a rather straightforward topical study of the gospel. Brother Burton rotates the speakers. So unlike "Mormon Doctrine," the brainchild of Elder Bruce R. McConkie, it is not just one voice, but also many voices. He has quotes from all parts of this dispensation, and also includes citations from the scriptures, making the book complete and powerful.

Testimonial: A friend of mine who was a counselor at Especially For Youth (a youth summer camp like Vacation bible School), said that another one of the counselors used this book to help resolve the questions of one of the attendees. That makes it worth the bother of compiling and publishing.

This book is quite user friendly. I was really impressed with the cross-referencing of topics. The Savior "expounded all the scriptures in one" (3 Nephi 23:14), and this unity is key to understanding the gospel. I have been using it a lot since becoming an instructor in my church's Elder's class.

The cover is nice and attractive. The marble pattern makes the book look like a bank: solid, authoritative and assuring. The printing quality is good: there is no fading and I have yet to find a typo. I also like the cover font and design, which are appropriate with out being gaudy or garish.

The hardbound edition also comes with the book on CD-ROM, for easier access.

An excellent reference book for writing talks, preparing lessons, or researching Gospel topics. "We Believe" contains the writing of modern-day LDS prophets and apostles (as well as scriptures) organized by topic (such as Prayer, Revelation, Apostacy, Priesthood, etc.)

I love this book. It has tons of beautiful exterior photos but I would like to see more historical photos and more interior shots. I would also love to see more recounts by the people who lived there. There are a few stories and I read them over and over. I'd really like to give this book a four and a half but that's not an option.

Should you actually wish to drive down either Westmoreland or Portland Places, expect an unnessecarily rude treatment from what must be the local rent-a-cop. It matters not the price of your car or attire- you might get (as I did) threatened to be "thrown in jail for trespassing", and lectured as if you were an idiot. Other students of architecture beware. It happened to me, and judging by the character of the "gentleman" in question, I'm just glad I'm not black. I escaped without kissing the hood of my car.

Congratulations to all that contributed to this outstanding book. The history of the Places was carefully and completely researched and presented with beautiful photographs.

This is a really beautiful book that intertwines scripture with glorious artistry to tell the story of the birth of Jesus.

This book is one of the most beautiful depictions of the birth of our Lord. The images are so emotion-filled. The one I like particularly well is of Joseph and Mary and the infant Savior. Mary is holding the baby in her arms while Joseph looks at him with love, amazement and a little curiosity. Priceless!! A must have!

Absolutely beautiful, poignant pictures accompany the scriptural telling of the Saviors birth. I read these same scriptures to my children every christmas, how nice it will be to have them all together with pictures to go with them. This a brilliant artist whose paintings seem to come to life. One can feel the emotions on Mary and Joseph's faces and the pictures of the Christ Child are fantastic. LDS readers will enjoy this book best because some references are made from LDS scriptures .