Organizations Books

Out of all house church books, this is my favorite because of the straightforward and concise dissertation on the hinderances to Biblical community, outreach, service, and fellowship that most Institutional Churches naturally inhibit.

Easy to read yet deeply profound in meaning, Smith gives adequate Scripture and documented research as to the problems hindering true revival in our churches today. Free from bitterness or complaining, the author recognizes that God is still sovereign over all His church, regardless of our flawed platforms, yet advocates the house church model as one that is most Biblically centered on Christ's purpose for believers. He also leaves plenty of freedom to enjoy variety within the house church model, structure, and operation, using language free from a dogmatic and know-it-all pretense.

In all his proposals, most readers will feel quite convicted by their dependence upon being a spoonfed benchwarming puppet on Sunday, their wasted resources on useless building expenditures, their prideful disunifying sectarianism within their denomination, and their lack of concern for the needs of others in their community. Smith admonishes a 24/7 Christianity where EVERYTHING you do is glorifying to God...including your job, family, chores, free time, etc., instead of just doing the usual list of spiritual things proscribed by the church. No wonder we can't feel the power of God or the freedom for the Holy Spirit to move in our hearts and our gatherings!

A MUST HAVE BOOK for any student of the Scriptures or those who feel there has to be more to the Christian life than the usual Sunday morning routine.

I have read many books on church restoration. This is currently the one I am recommending to those who notice the problems, but are unsure of the answers. For those who recognize that the plethora of religious gimicks and more "purpose-driven" products will not do... this book is for you.

There are many authors today that are very elequently able to articulate the problem with the church today, yet... most of them are not able to do what Smith has done in his gentle presentation. The problems in the institutional church are great and the people who support it are very dependent upon it. I submit to you that slamming them with their error is not the most effective means of conversion. Smith presents biblical truth as an invitation. He reveals the problem and invites you to discover the answer. He allows the Holy Spirit to connect the dots!

I appreciated Smith's focus on community from the very start. I also was refreshed by his obvious influence of the Anabaptist tradition. It was a breath of fresh air to hear a "house church" proponent talk about the doctrine of the two kingdoms and radical discipleship.

Christ is the answer to the church's ills today. A return to the person and work of Christ is the foundation of our faith. Ultimately, people must receive a fresh new vision of Christ and his work (life and teachings) before anything of true worth can take place. Then, there must be an undestanding of God's image in us is community. The Trinity enjoys community in eternal love and faithfulness. This is the image in which we were created. We experience this community together in the church once we have seen Jesus (God in the flesh) as he truly is and we gather around him in natural Body life.

If you are noticing the problems and are looking for more than just pop-culture American Christianity... or maybe you are just curious... I encourage you to get this book. So far... Smith's book is the one to start with... in my humble opinion.

After reading Smith, I suggest reading:

The Centrality of Jesus Christ (Works of T. Austin-Sparks)
The Normal Christian Life
The Release of the Spirit
Created for Community,: Connecting Christian Belief with Christian Living
Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices
Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community

Christian Smith goes to the heart of the problems within the organized Christian church. He does more than just complain about the way things are though ... he offers practical solutions to each problem in easy to understand text.

If you are still in the organized church -- yet, you see that "the emperor has no clothes," this book is for you. It will confirm many things that the Lord has been showing you. It will give you the strength to leave the "dog and pony show" (the performance-based church) and to forge out in the land that the Lord will show you.

If you desire to meet in a simple way with other believers and develop true relationships -- then this book is for you. It will give you the tools you'll need to begin your journey.

This book received such a glowing in-depth review (from reviewer "Center for Nonprofit Management"), I was disappointed to see that it was out-of-print.

Then I saw the good news - there's a second edition of this book (which strangely was published only 7 days before the in-depth review was written)!

So fret not, you activist, grant-writing wannabes (or is that grant-writing, activist wannabes?), just head on over to ISBN 0787965782 and begin your journey of making a difference!

If you come in to our nonprofit management support organization and ask for a book on grant proposal writing, there are two we'll pull out right away: Grassroots Grants and Winning Grants Step by Step. We're often asked which to choose. Of all the books we see, these are the two we most often recommend, but they do have different approaches.

Winning Grants Step by Step takes a pragmatic tone. It accepts the rules of the game and offers to show you how to win within them. "Most funders prefer to give grants for new and expanding programs or in support of special projects and new ideas rather than for the general operating expenses of an organization or the ongoing costs of established programs," it explains. "Because funders have these preferences, this workbook uses the idea of creating a new program as the basis for developing a proposal." (The book does also give examples of core operating support proposals, and does start with a planning guide to help you see which programs fit your priorities).
In the introduction to Grassroots Grants, on the other hand, the publisher shares her qualms about publishing a book about grants at all, preferring that the reader focus first on developing more renewable and less restricted gifts from individual donors. "This book is about two things: money and power," says Grassroots Grants, and calmly analyzes the dynamics of both in the grant proposal process. This big-picture view is in the end more pragmatic - it encourages you to take control of the grantseeking process by searching out those funders and pitching those programs that really best fit with what you are trying to do.

Both books have excellent project planning guidelines. As Winning Grants Step by Step observes, "Generally, organizations will spend approximately 80 percent of their time planning a project and only 20 percent of their time writing and packaging a proposal," so this section is obviously very important. Both books ask questions such as "What is unique about your organization's project?" "Is anyone else working on a similar project?" "What members of your community support each project?"

Both also contain useful information about finding appropriate funders, which is key to the process - much more important than your writing skills is finding the right funder who cares about projects like yours. Although Winning Grants Step by Step puts this information at the end in an appendix, you should really read it first, particularly the excellent section on corporate giving programs. Grassroots Grants contains very helpful guidelines about what to consider when deciding whether a funder is really a good fit for your organization, and detailed information about ways to develop good relationships with potential funders.

The books have different approaches to how they help you with your own writing. Winning Grants Step by Step has a workbook format, with questionnaires you fill out as you go, so that by the time you have completed them you will have addressed most of the subjects covered in a typical proposal, and it will be easy to cut and paste the appropriate bits into the funder's preferred format. It comes with all the worksheets on a CD-ROM so you can fill them out electronically and reuse them. If you like project planning, but get nervous about the writing process, this format may help walk you through. Grassroots Grants has questionnaires throughout the text, and it has more examples of proposals, query letters, and other documents with notes on how they were developed. If you like to write by reading examples to inspire you to your own purposes, this book will suit you.

Ultimately, these books complement one another. Even if you prefer the workbook format of Winning Grants Step by Step, the "big picture" you get from reading Grassroots Grants will help you answer all those questions. Likewise, if you prefer the style of Grassroots Grants, you can still benefit from the excellent sections on overhead costs and planning for sustainability in Winning Grants Step by Step.

Andy Robinson tells it straight and tells it true - this is a very clear and lucid text on the art of getting grants, written from a grassroots perspective. I especially appreciated the wealth of samples and examples. Robinson holds your hand through the whole process from beginning research all the way through to dealing with acceptance and rejection letters.

I have just finished reading "The Habits of Highly Effective Churches" through for the second time and will probably read it again in the future. Having served in ministries for over three decades, I recognize the nine habits presented in this book as touchstones for any ministry that wants to see lives genuinely transformed. It is too easy for a church to lose its effectiveness. Barna's book helps to show why so many churches are filled with attenders yet are having little impact on the world around them with the life-changing message of the Gospel.

Buy this book! George Barna always has some interesting insights that will challenge you to think about your church, denomination, or parachurch organization. Besides, his books are among the few resources you can get that are based on scientific research and not hunches.

Borrow this book only if you have everything Barna has written, you go to one of his conferences at least every two years, and you just want to take a quick look at his new book.

The book describes "a ministry as being effective when lives are transformed such that people are constantly enabled to become more Christ-like. Effective ministries foster significant and continual changes in how people live." page 7-8]

Of the nine habits, one of my favorites is that highly effective churches develop significant relationships within the congregation. Significant relationship with God and one another transform lives!

According to Barna, the bar that defines highly effective churches is high. It probably ought to be because too many churches feel that good enough is good enough when mandates of the Kingdom of God may be calling for more.

I am very impressed with Barna's book, as he hits the nail on the head on a number of issues. Based on his research, this Christian pollster shows how the church should relate to the world around it. I am going to go through this again--I highlighted throughout--and write down the main points. I also want to give this book to my pastors, as there are a number of areas my local church could improve. If we want to see God work in our churches, then we need to be smart and use biblical principles and practices. Barna definitely provides us with a solid work here.

An important study of the impact of an intense collegiate experience on students.

Education program from the 60s still lasts From the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet 28 September 1999

In 1965, with anti-Vietnam demonstrations at their worst, philosophy professor Joseph Tussman began The Experimental College Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His goal, education for the sake of the individual and of society, sounds like a dream for the jaded higher education of today. In Habits of Mind: the Experimental College Program at Berkeley, Katherine Bernhardi Trow evaluates the program and its long- term effects. While evaluation of education generally focuses narrowly on the short-sighted and fashionable, this book's great merit is its description of the long term effects. Tussman College lasted four years, from 1965-1969. Some 300 students were chosen at random to participate. Trow interviewed forty students who completed the program, and she paints a vivid picture of how they were affected, what they learned and what positive influence it had in their lives. Tussman maintained that it was the university's fundamental duty to reawaken interest and get students involved for the sake of principles which are fundamental for individuals and for society: to develop an exercise of power built on rational, democratic and constitutional principles; to increase sensitivity to humanitarian values and fundamental human problems; to cultivate and strengthen ways of life and ways of conduct which make it possible for humanity to continue a war with institutions and with a spirit of rational discussion to find solutions to problems. Democracy demands of its citizens a political interest and active participation. To do this, according to Tussman, one must educate oneself in a fashion which before the breakthrough of democracy was reserved for members of the ruling class. Students probed deeply into fundamental problems. They examined the interplay between freedom and power. They were taught to be responsible citizens in a democratic society and custodians of western civilization. The program consisted of two parts: a syllabus and a pedagogical method. The syllabus focused on big problems and cultural crisis periods in history which had driven great thinkers to tackle fundamental questions. The reading list consisted of classics, such as the Iliad and works by Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mill, and Marx, along with more current books, such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X. These were books by authors now viewed as "dead, white males." But students remember the reading as fantastic. Pedagogically, the program diverged radically from then-prevalent teaching methods. Teachers were recruited from various areas of study. All the reading material was read by both students and teacher, regardless of which subject the teacher normally taught. Lectures were held twice a week with all the students and teachers present, and smaller seminars were held. The students wrote essays every other week, and every day they jotted down thoughts and reflections prompted by books, lectures, seminars and discussions. These notes became an intellectual autobiography. The activities reinforced each other and formed a tight intellectual tapestry which stimulated and strengthened learning and education. It was, in short, a program which moved against the stream of mass education. The program seems even more radical if one considers that it, with its high standards, was established when the general trend was toward a relaxation of the demands on students and when Berkeley, like many American universities, was in a permanent state of uproar. What were the long-term effects? In the evaluation, the dense essay- writing comes out as highly valued and as a central force in the program-- at once challenging and entertaining. Essay assignments taught the students to think more analytically and abstractly. The students' linguistic ability was radically improved, in speech and in writing and as much in style as in grammar. The intense contact with the teacher, and the criticism the teacher provided in tutorials, played a constructive and crucial role. The lack of grades was positive. Instead of focusing on grades, one concentrated on the ideas and the knowledge for itself; competitive thinking was conspicuous in its absence. The important thing was to understand what one read and to be able to apply it in other contexts than the immediate one. It was not regarded as meritorious to memorize details in order to regurgitate them later. Tussman encouraged individual thought. The environment--a separate house and small groups --contributed to the feeling of a learned society and stimulated the students. The program helped students to grow intellectually and morally. Their ability to analyze, to adapt themselves quickly to new things, new environments and new problems and to view these from different perspectives grew. They acquired a better understanding of the world around them and a better ability to interpret and understand events in it. Empathy increased and led to intellectual satisfaction and a more content life, which is reflected in the professions in which the program's former students are now active: physician, journalist, attorney, civil engineer, etc. Why did the program cease if it was so good? The answer is brief: university bureacratic staffing problems and a certain amount of lack of interest in basic education at research-oriented Berkeley made the dedicated Tussman tire. The market has become an ideology instead of a means--even, with some exceptions, in academia. Students do not study to grow as a human being, but to satisfy the market. Within the not too distant future, perhaps we will hear a university or college president who, in a travesty of Kennedy's inauguration speech, will welcome novices with the admonishment: "Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market." Doris Lessing calls the product of this competence-fixation the well-educated barbarians; those who have gone to school for twenty years, have brilliant records, but never read a book, know no history, and care only about knowledge in their field. That group does not include the graduates of Tussman College.

An exceptionally rich and multifaceted account of an experiment which occupies an interesting and important place in the history of American higher education.

The book is very logically arranged into 3 parts. For using feeds, making feeds and mixing feeds. Most readers will probably deal with the first part and maybe the third part.

Using feeds is explained as being able to aggregate data from websites offering these using RSS or Atom methods. From which, you can see how to recast the output into HTML pages for your website. Or maybe send it to your mailbox. Actually and more realistically, to the mailboxes of those who visit your website and ask for this feed.

Orchard deliberately does not go much into the fine distinctions between the different and incompatible RSS standards. Or likewise with the various Atom formats. More technical books can discuss these points ad nauseum. But Orchard is aiming this text at a programmer who just wants to put together a news feed, and does not really care about lower level details.

Making a news feed is the second part of the book. Only a fraction of readers will head here. It's not easy to produce original content, after all.

The last part of the book is essentially an advanced continuation of the first part. You are shown how to embed higher level logic into processing the feeds. With an extensive example on using a Bayesian to try to identify news articles that might be of interest to your readership. Be aware that the Bayesian method is not perfect. Occasionally, you might get an incongruous article.

Definitely, Orchard has produced a nice programming book. (In Python.)

Often times there's information somewhere on the web that you want to use in your own computing. Perhaps you want to look at news stories and display the headlines of what's happening today with a link to the site of the story. In the early days of the web, when you wanted to do something like that you had to do it manually or do some kind of hard coding to parse the information you wanted out of the HTML. Tedious, and if they ever change their web page you're re-doing your code.

This is the problem that RSS/Atom are intended to fix. These are standards that, when followed, present the information from a site in a standardized manner that makes it easy to parse.

First, what this book is NOT. This book does not tell you all the details about how to put RSS/Atom information up on a site. Instead, this book is on taking the information from an RSS/Atom 'page' and getting into a form you can use.

The book is broken down into three parts: Consuming Feeds, Producing Feeds, Remixing Feeds. In each part the author programs a few simple applications to show you what can be done. The programming is in Python, the operating system he uses is Linux.

The only complaint I could make about this book is that it would help the newbie to have another chapter at the beginning that talked about some common feeds and the nature of the tags they use to encapsulate their data.

Rather than just read RSS feeds, would you like to *do stuff* with RSS and Atom? I received a copy of a really good book that goes beyond the nuts and bolts of RSS formatting... Hacking RSS and Atom by Leslie M. Orchard.

Contents:
Part 1 - Consuming Feeds: Getting Ready to Hack; Building a Simple Feed Aggregator; Routing Feeds to Your Email Inbox; Adding Feeds to Your Buddy List; Taking Your Feeds with You; Subscribing to Multimedia Content Feeds
Part 2 - Producing Feeds: Building a Simple Feed Producer; Taking the Edge Off Hosting Feeds; Scraping Web Sites to Produce Feeds; Monitoring Your Server with Feeds; Tracking Changes in Open Source Projects; Routing Your Email Inbox to Feeds; Web Services and Feeds
Part 3 - Remixing Feeds: Normalizing and Converting Feeds; Filtering and Sifting Feeds; Blending Feeds; Republishing Feeds; Extending Feeds
Part 4 - Implementing a Shared Feed Cache
Index

This book starts with the assumption that you either already understand all the details of RSS/Atom formatting, or that you're willing to learn the details on your own as you go. This is *not* a reference book on RSS standards. Rather, Orchard answers the question "what can you *do* with RSS that's cool and useful?". Using a series of projects, he starts to get you thinking about how you might use RSS technology in ways you haven't considered. For instance, having your log files report things via RSS feed could give you immediate notice of unusual situations. Or perhaps having RSS feeds go to your IM client would allow you to react quickly to news and information. The possibilities are endless, and Orchard does a good job in getting you to think.

The caveat here is that he assumes a particular software language and platform for building these hacks. Python is the language used, so this book would be most helpful if you already knew the language (or were willing to figure it out on the fly). Likewise, he writes for the Unix platform primarily. You can use Unix emulators like Cygwin to run Unix-like command in Windows, or you can mentally adapt the concepts to whatever hack you want to build. At first I was thinking that single focus might be a liability for the book. But after thinking about it, I don't think it's that bad. It maintains the focus on the hack instead of on how every different platform needs to be coded, hence the book is more concise. Also, his goal is to get you to hack and experiment, not to teach you a technology via a tutorial. Since hacking is experimenting, you may end up hacking these ideas on a couple of different fronts...

Excellent idea and application book... If you're interested in going beyond simple feed readers and building stuff for yourself, this is a definite purchase you want to check out...

Nel Noddings absolutely hits the nail on the head with her discussion of how we need to reevaluate the aims of our educational system. As it is currently situated, education serves almost entirely an economic function, in preparing students to enter the workforce and become good consumers in a successful economy. Whatever social functions the school serves are relegated to the background, and in fact tend to be discouraged if they are ever considered to be possibly getting in the way of the true goals. Of course, Noddings is also right in that we seem to have even lost focus of our original economic aims. The need to compete with others in standardized testing has forced students to learn things that may be becoming increasingly less and less relevant - Noddings's point about how asking an algebra teacher says that the point of a lesson is always going to be related only to other algebra lessons is something that every student of the school system has been frustrated with at one point or another (75).
Fortunately, Noddings does not fall into the trap that I envisioned as possible - that she would instead declare that the defined goal of education should be happiness. Such a lofty but ultimately nonsubstantive goal would be, to put it quite simply, silly, and ultimately even worse than the economic goals of the current arrangement. Fortunately, Noddings avoids the mistake of trying to make a singular definition of happiness and then working toward it. Instead, the final two thirds of the book are devoted to various different parts of life that Noddings would like to see become more prominent as aims of education. What makes the book so good is in how Noddings successfully weaves in the notion of happiness throughout all of these elements of life - which include raising a family, spirituality, participation in the democratic process, and, yes, in the workplace - together with the discussion of how education must be aimed toward these goals. It is almost as if the book is a collaboration of two distinct theses - how these parts of life are important to our happiness, and how education must serve these parts of life - and that seems to be the reason for how the book flows as well as it does when it is based on a topic like happiness that in lesser hands would be incredibly trite and quickly grow repetitive.
Of the two theses, neither is easy to quibble with. In regard to the thesis about how schools need to refocus their aims toward more relevant applications, I certainly have no disagreement; I believe that we clearly have lost track of what schools should be about and that the U.S. educational system is slowly careening toward greater and greater irrelevance (although it probably isn't much of a new phenomenon after all; how much of what scholars studied in ancient times was really necessary for their life experiences?). The idea of how the various elements that Noddings discusses as being keys to personal happiness are somewhat more spurious, in that personal happiness is by definition personal, and what makes one person happy is going to be far different from what makes another person happy (traditional education does make many lifelong scholars happy, for one). But Noddings does allow for this, and so I have no quarrel with her desire to try to point out some elements that typically make people happy for the sake of the argument.
Consider a sample sentence from the introduction to chapter 7; the introductions to all of the chapters in parts 2 and 3 of the book are structured quite similarly: "Possibly there is no human task more demanding, more rewarding, and more universal than parenting, and yet our schools apparently think that algebra and Shakespeare are more important" (138). The point of how schools are inadequate in their current aims is constantly reinforced. Here Noddings makes the argument that education needs to be reshaped such that students become more acquainted with concepts like child-rearing and how parents can play effective roles in their children's lives, "without preaching or direct instruction" (156). Noddings is right in having to address this final qualifier, since such nontraditional lessons might be controversial if they try to teach right and wrong answers in the same way that algebra might. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to go in that direction. After all, having an open discussion about the legitimacy of educational lessons is far from being the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing, rather, would be to maintain our current inertia.

Even though I live in Norway where the educational system works differently than in the US, this book was a real eyeopener to me. In a time where the school focuses more and more on the student's achievements in basic subjects like math, reading and writing, and where there's been put more and more weight on testing the students in these skills, this book represent and alternative way of thinking. Do we all need an academic education? Why do we educate students in the thought that all of them should go on with their studies beyond a collegelevel? What about all those occupations where you don't need academic skills, those occupations where you need practical skills? (skills that you weren't taught in school because the weight was put on the teoretical subjects). Being a teacher or a parent, this book will give you a new perspective on how to raise and educate our children.

In Happiness And Education, author and academician Nel Noddings (Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, Standford University) draws upon her years of experience, expertise and research as a teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer in public schools to address the very specific issue of the relationship of happiness to that of the experience of education and why, although parental expectations are quite clear that happiness is a kind of byproduct of education, it is not normal mentioned as one of the principle aims of education. Professor Noddings explores what it means to be happy, and then goes on to address how educators can help children to understand what happiness is. Criticizing an almost exclusive focus on economic well-being as the approved outcome of educational accomplishment, Professor Noddings emphasizes the contributions education provides with respect to making a home, parenting, developing character and interpersonal growth, identifying and engaging in work that is satisfying, participating effectively in a political democracy, and ways in which we can make schools and classrooms happy places of learning and intellectual exploration. Happiness And Education is especially commended to the attention of public and private school teachers, and administrative policy makers as informed, thoughtful, and though-provoking reading.

Being a Mason for years, and having read many books on the subject in search of what Freemasonry was really all about, I could not help feeling, when I had finished this book, that this was it. Yes, This is Freemasonry from a Theosophical perspective. I Think it is the true perspective.

An excellent resource guide for the serious Mason who wants more than superficial rah-rah and to really understand the esoterica their lodges were based upon. Leadbeater does a fine job at bridging the gaps. Good reading!

Leadbeater being a Theosophist had a very deep knowledge of the inner workings of a Masonic Lodge. A very interesting book.

After 20 years in pastoral ministry, preparing for retirement, I wish I were back in seminary, with Galindo's book. He has given me a hugely helpful way to understand what goes on in churches. I'm buying a copy for my district superintendent, and my friend who's just starting seminary.

I do have a question: if a pastor canot "cast a vision" for a church until she's been there five years, how does that work for us United Methodists and our brief-tenure itinerant system? And I wish Galindo had used a few more examples, real-people illustratons of his oobservations. Other than that, I'm unequivocaly enthusiastioc - and I do plan to start over, reading the book again!

Israel Galindo's "Hidden Lives of Congregations" affords an excellent overview of the Christian church and its followers, diagnosing the cause and effect of the life, growth and attrition of churches in America. Its in-depth analysis of the mindsets of the average churchgoer, the clergy and the infrastructure of the church provides us with an essential profile of the movers and shakers that make the modern church the cornerstone of American society it is today. Yet we are introduced to the paradox as to how conformity to industrial paradigms result in the failed mission of the church in its purest form. This social phenomenon is explored in an informative and comprehensive dialogue that makes this a worthy addition to any Christian library.

The author leads us through an exploratory narrative as we trace the paths of ministers and their congregations who begin on the home church level, evolving into storefront ministries, growing into the need for their own church building, and finally expanding into property development to suit their advancing requirements. Only we find that the transition results in the church morphing into a mirror image of the secular corporation, requiring a board of directors to supercede the elders of the church in ministering to its greater needs. The pastor grows more detached from his teeming congregation, his leaders forced to spend more time administering to the needs of its members than pursuing its evangelical and community goals. As a result, the monolithic superchurch achieves corporate success as its profits soar, but ultimately becomes a failure to God and man.

"Hidden Lives" can be seen as an indictment of the consumer-friendly megachurch system that dominates the American religious scene today. The author depicts how idealistic ministers become discouraged and demoralized by the myriad of responsibilities thrust upon their shoulders, faced with exponential demands of their overgrown ministries. The book suggests a return to the apostolic vision of Pauline doctrine, the smaller church being more flexible and less encumbered as it pursues its simple mission to preach the Gospel to all nations. Providing a variety of social services in ministering to the needs of its followers is just one of the many excesses that hinder the church from its soul-saving mission. This book dissects the problem at its root causes and gives every clergyman the opportunity to avoid many of the pitfalls on the road ahead.

This is an excellent gift item for Christian workers and clergymen, as well as sociology buffs and casual readers alike. Don't miss out on this well-written, in-depth study; your home church will thank you for it.

This book opened my eyes to a lot of the enfighting that you see in churches. It has also enhanced my thoughts about the spirituality of church and why they worship the way they do.

This book provides a VP of sales or sales manager with the behind the scenes research that went into Professional Selling Skills and other landmark training by Learning International. If anyone has a questions as to why this training vs. others - this answers the question! By the way, I would highly recommend their training also. The best consultative sales training on the market.

This is a very clearly written book that puts definition to what you are likely already seeing as your new role as a sales person in the 90's. I found it very applicable for my sales position in aerospace sales. It gives an outline of how to assess your customers and meet their expectations. It further spells out what skills you need as a sales person today and what customers expect from you. It stresses the changing role to business consulant from order taker. Good reading

Kevin J. Corcoran is my uncle, so I thought his book was down right cool. Maybe I think that all those related to me have that benefit. But seriously, this book presents some very significant business information with some flair. Check it out! I should be in sales... Brian A. Corcoran (brian@princeton.edu)

Linda Lyman has captured the essence of the typical experiences for a principal working in a poor school. However, the object of her research, Kenneth Hinton, is a remarkable principal. His decisions are grounded in doing what is best for children. He cares. He cares enough to make tough decisions that can be risky for any principal. Lyman sets the groundwork for understanding the principalship and leads the reader to understand the work of servant leaders. In addition to the stories, she provides an excellent background for the theory of educational leadership and a template for turnaround principals. This book should be reading for every school board and every person seeking to become an administrator.
Kathleen Hickey

It is so refreshing to learn of an individual, such as Kenneth Hinton, who sincerely cares about children, parents, and his profession. Many may claim that they care but do not take the extraordinary measures necessary to convey it. Hats off to Mr. Hinton and Ms. Lyman for a job well done!

In her recently published book, Linda Lyman shares an aspect of leadership that focuses on caring and its implications for learning within schools. She does this through an ethnographic approach by observing a caring principal within the context of an entire school community. First, Lyman introduces a caring environment within a theoretical context. Then, she profiles the principal, Kenneth H. Hinton, by providing an historical background of the school and community with various themes and implications for caring. Each chapter is rife with specific experiences illustrating examples with references to research on caring. Through the comments of Hinton, his colleagues, the children, and their parents, readers get a glimpse of what a significant difference caring leadership makes within their learning community. Questions at the end of each chapter provide focus for personal reflection and grist for further dialogue. Lyman chronicles Hinton as a catalyst who not only shapes change for what is best for children, but he transforms lives and learning through caring. The reader can, then, better recognize and reflect upon how caring makes a positive difference within a learning environment. Not only is this a provocative and inspiring read, but Lyman articulates and illustrates a critical component of learning which is caring that might otherwise be difficult to illuminate. At a time when publics continue to scrutinize the quality of learning within schools, Lyman provides a refreshing articulation and detailed description of how caring schools come to be and the tremendous rewards for all involved. Lyman's research and literary contributions provide hope as well as specific ingredients for a personal and professional commitment to children and caring. This book provides reason for further critical reflection and dialogue on this topic.