Benedict Books

This is the updated version of Jodi's guide. I love the hidden paths and the stores that are kept a secret. Jodi uncovers them. If you are visiting the hamptons for the first time or just collect her books this one is a sure hit.

One of the most important questions facing Christians today is the question, "What is the Church?" This is a scholarly, but eminently readable book by a Catholic about the Church, but it's usefulness goes way beyond the Catholic Church. This book by Fr. Heim is must reading for anyone - especially seminarians, priests and Catholic educators - who want to know what Vatican II was all about and how it understood the nature and mission of the Church. It gives the reader a deep appreciation for the tremendous contribution Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has made to our understanding of the Church.

Fr.Ashley has produced a well-documented and thoughtful book on the roles of men and women in the church, discussing what true justice is, what participation in the life and happenings of the Church really means, and defenses for the prohibition of women to the sacrament of Holy Orders. Clearly, he has taken this issue very seriously and has done considerbale research in the area. The bibliography alone is amazing. While the work presents the reader with familiar issues, he explores a few new dimensions and contributes what I feel to be a significant aspect of gender and participation in the Church, namely the subject of what it means to be an active, "participating" member of the Church as a man or woman and the necessity of maintaining fidelity and "justice" to God's plan for the Church. Very interesting and worthwhile!

Fr Groeschel is well-known for his speaking talents and his writings but this little book is outstanding.His comments and guidance each day through Lent has helped me contemplate on issues I hadn't even thought about. He helps you see things in perspective and deal with adversity grounded in a perspective based on historical understanding. Lent is now in its fourth week and every day I am eagerly looking forward to reading his text.

Though not wishing to compromise my Reformed Baptist convictions, I didn't want to be ignorant about the new pope Benedict XVI (sixteenth). This slim book is a biography which traces his Bavarian upbringing, time as a priest and academic, and ultimate election as pope.

Ratzinger has a passion for the conservation of the values of the Catholic Church, this was reflected in his reaction to Vatican II, liberation theology and, more generally, his role as doctrinal "enforcer". It is only right that this biography was written by Greg Watts, who obviously shares Ratzinger's passion. Watts writes clearly, grippingly and succeeds at informing us intelligently about this unique and intriguing individual.

If you enjoy this book, you may also like Benedict XVI: The Man Who Was Ratzinger by Michael S. Rose (ISBN 1890626635), which also sports a great review on Amazon by top-50 reviewer Orrin C. Judd. This book has an oddly similar looking cover to Watts'.

Within his collection of essays in this book, Anderson explores the underlying cultures of Indonesian politics. He ties back the political atmosphere of Indonesia to the social values of the most dominant culture in Indonesia, the Javanese culture. These essays were written prior to 1984 (mostly in the late 60's), but their contents relate well even to the present political scenes of Indonesia.

As an American citizen with Indonesian ancestry, I find that this book would help anyone who is interested in learning the complexity of Indonesia's sociopolitical arena. A lot of misunderstandings about Indonesia's politics can be cleared by reading this book. This book does not talk about the current political scenes, rather it explains the origins of political values that are dominant in Indonesia even today.

This is a wonderful book for many reasons, but the biggest wonder was that it was ever published! It documents obscure research about an obscure programming language--and the point of the research is to find out why it is so obscure!

If you are a big fan of prolog, but are still wondering why it didn't take off, this book will tell you. For me, the biggest take away messages are these:

1. The very uniformity of the syntax--which makes Prolog "beautiful" in a sense--is a source of obscurity, because since everything is just clauses, its hard to tell what any particular clause is doing. In, say, C, its easy to tell if something is a for-loop or not--the keyword "for" is right there. But in prolog, iteration over a range of values looks pretty much like any other programming statement. There is no syntactic differentiation to help you understand the semantics.

2. In order to understand a prolog program, you pretty much have to be a master of redaction criticism. For example, a prolog program to sum up the values of all the integers in a list of integers is typically written by taking the code for the member/2 function and editing it--adding here an accumulator, there a summation, etc. This is called "Skeletons and Techniques" by Lee Naish and other exponents. It is a very powerful way to develop prolog programs, but someone else wanting to understand _your_ prolog program must first understand how member/2 works, then they must work backwards from the changes you've made to it, first determining how you've edited member/2 and what your editorial changes mean, before they can understand your code. Its very tricky!

Talk about a book which isn't for everyone! But if you are in the business of designing languages, there's lots of interesting insights here just waiting to be gleaned.

Saint Benedict of Nursia, probably the greatest influence on Western Monasicism, lived a life filled with many miraculous deeds, indeed, so many that Pope Saint Gregory I wrote an entire book about just his miracles. This little gem serves not truly as a collection of stories about miraculous deeds. It is quite possible that not even all these deeds occured during Saint Benedict's lifetime. However, all these deeds point back to lives that were influenced by deep faiths in God and therefore, serve a high purpose.

Included among these tales are the interlocutions of a certain deacon, by name Peter, which help to clarify difficulties with certain theological topics presented by Gregory.

It does not matter if these tales are all true. The subject at hand is the life of a Saint who lived for God in his lifetime and was indeed a blessed individual, influencing others to live for God. I feel that this is an excellent reading for individuals who want to read about the historical and traditional Saint Benedict of Nursia.

This book is a real gem for anyone with an interest in monastic spirituality, the Rule of Saint Benedict in particular, or the charisma that was Basil Pennington. He lived a remarkable life--a cloistered monk but also a world-traveler. A scholar but also with a great talent for making the wisdom of monastic life down to earth for those of us on the outside. He died in 2005 and these talks were given to the monks in Georgia during his time as abbot, there. As a Protestant man, I must say that I found them uplifting, informative, and instructive on how to live as husband, father, and son of God. There is also a two CD set of the talks themselves (the book is the transcription of the talks), available directly from the publisher. The audio talks remind me of the talks that Thomas Merton gave at Gethsemani back in the 1950s and 60s.