Ward Books

In Faithful Dissenters, Robert McClory has done a masterful job of bringing to light and to life the history of "faithful dissent" within the Catholic Church. He accomplishes this by focusing on the fascinating lives of seventeen men and women who were moved to dissent from a prevailing church doctrine or practice of their day, and whose efforts substantially contributed to effecting a significant change in that doctrine or practice. These men and women all shared a deep love for the Catholic Church, and remained faithful members,in the face of rejection and even persecution by church authorities. Sometimes the desired changes took place within the lifetime of the dissenter. John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian who died in 1967, strongly supported religious freedom and the separation of Church and state. During the thirties and forties he was heavily criticized for his writings, and was ultimately silenced in the fifties for his opposition to Vatican doctrine on religious freedom and church-state relations. Before he died, however, his positions on these issues were essentially adopted as church doctrine by Vatican II. Ives Congar, a Dominican theologian who lived during the same period, but whose interest lay in promoting dialogue among the Christian churches also suffered rejection and silencing during the thirties, forties and early fifties, but lived to see his support of ecumenism adopted as church policy by Vatican II. Congar was even named a cardinal of the church shortly before his death. Others dissenters did not live to see the changes they sought for their church happen in their lifetimes. Mary Ward,for example, who lived in England shortly after the Protestant Reformation, sought freedom for women to form religious orders in active service to the poor and the uneducated. (Prior to her time, women religious were required to live in strictly cloistered, contemplative orders.) Without official permission from Rome, Mary founded an order, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that served the poor and uneducated, both in England and on the Continent in the sixteen hundreds. For her trouble, she was formally accused by the Office of the Inquisition of being "a heretic, schismatic, and rebel to the Holy Church" and imprisoned in a Munich prison for an indeterminant term. A hundred and fifty years would pass before her order gained official approval from Rome. In the meantime, however, the door was opened for women to found active orders of religious. An even longer time, of course, elapsed after the death of Galileo before the official Church recognized the freedom he sought for scientific exploration. These and fourteen other stories of men and women who loved and changed the church are told in fascinating detail in Faithful Dissenters. Anyone who is interested in how individuals can effect change within an entrenched institution will want to read this book.

The most amazing aspect of this ever more relevant volume is its revelation of the machinations of the currently seated pope, then called Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who twenty years or more ago ruled with an iron fist the Sacra Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei to destroy many of the most compassionate and thoughtful and prayerful and respected theologians of that generation, leaving our Holy Mother Church lobotomized and without heart or soul. Other such are the Fathers Schillebeexc (Spelling? See his books here on amazon, including his Jesus and his Christ.), the Boffs and his own former theology professor Father Hans Kung. Had he been able he would have silnced the theologian of the Second Vatican Council, Fathe Karl Rahner.

John Paul the Second silenced and effectively destroyed all those most awakened and liberated by the previous two pontiffs, Paul and John, through his torpedo Ratzinger, leaving no one standing beside Ratzinger to follow him.

Read Pope Paul's Populorum Progressio, Pope John's Pacem in Terris. Read the contemporary National Conference of Catholic Bishop's Economic Justice for All annd THe Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response to see how far the Catholic CHurch has fallen as a moral voice, and read this present volume to weep at the crucifixion by Ratzinger of our greatest moral theologian the Rev. Father Charles Curran. THis text reads like a Stations of the Cross. Read it and weep at each station.

It reads like the court proceedings of a bad and baffling divorce in which an innocent Father is ripped to shreds by inquisitional, self-righteous, inexorable, ineluctable and unChristian attorneys. This text reveals how far Ratzinger lies from Christian compassion, CARITAS and the HOly Spirit.

I am sorry to see the only other review of this important and intriguing book discusses instead Faithful Dissenters: Stories of Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church by Robert McClory (Paperback - Oct 2000)!

John Ward provides an excellent overview about the power of values in a family business - how the right values can help the business for generations to come, but also how the wrong ones can hamper success. He also provides a good description about how a family's personal value systems affect the business unit and vice versa. A must read for anyone interested in building a lasting legacy!!!

I highly recommend all of John Ward's books about family businesses.

I was captivated by the story and the progression that it took, I just could not lay it down until I had read the entire book.. Julia is a wonderful person and writer.

This book was the best book I have read ever and I love to read, I have been faithful to Vc.Andrews and Dean Koontz but now I am totally Faithful to Julia Ortloff she is the best writter in my opion I recommend this book to everyone! I will be looking forward to more of Julias work.

Future geo-political and religious events will confirm the subject matter covered in this book. In fact the June 9th broadcast of the CNN Lou Dobbs tonight show already has. If you are looking for answers to life and desire to know where mankind is heading, then this book is a must read. The crossover appeal of this book will capture the secular and religious alike. The facts are undeniable and easily confirmed by the reader. I hope you enjoy. Ready or not, Jesus is soon to return.

This Expose' is a page-turner! Tomorrow's headlines today. I found "Final Reckoning: Mankind's Rendezvous with Eternity" riveting. The author clearly details and explains mankind's future with current events as told by the Jewish Prophets long ago. Remarkably, these events are occurring before our very eyes. This book is a must read and will leave a lasting mark upon your heart. Everyone needs to read this book.

'Why not be completely turned into fire?'

This was the response when one holy man went to another holy man asking what else he could do -- he practiced a disciplined rule of life, prayed, meditated, fasted, and did all that was expected, required, and good for spirituality.

'What else should I do?'

The response is a telling one, and the one from which Joan Chittister, OSB, derives the title of her book. Chittister is a well known author and lecturer on topics of spirituality, religious life, peacemaking, and social justice. The OSB that follows her name stands for Order of St. Benedict -- a monastic/spiritual framework that informs her work thoroughly.

Part of Chittister's work is to recover the connections between this ancient form of religious life and practice for today's world. 'The world that spawned religious life, even the religious life of this century, is not the world we're living in. If religious life has anything to do with real life, the hope of recasting it in old molds smacks of pure fantasy. Spending time and energy yearning for the return of the mythical past while the present swirls perilously around us, awash in the debris of rationalism in the social order and dogmatism in the church, only holds us back, I think, from moving in holy ways in a post-modern world.'

This is a hard statement to put into practice. What we must do, in very simple terms, is eliminate from our lives those things we tend to make into absolutes and idols (of particular danger in the present world, worldly and church-bound modes of thinking) so that we can reach into something more divine and lifegiving. However, this is not without similar traps. 'To attempt to fabricate a vision of religious life for a world, and for a time we may never see, takes as much power out of the present as a nostalgic commitment to the past. What's more, the fabrication, I think, is not for us to make. That is the work of the people who live it.'

In her beginning essay, Chittister takes on the issues of modernity in and outside the cloister, issues of feminism/anti-feminism, identity, enculturation, and the virtues of religious life for today. She expresses the fears that many feel, in and out of religious communities, that there are too many things being irretrievably lost from the past, while we have no real direction or guide into the future. Particularly for institutions, which tend to see institutional survival as the highest priority, there is a sense of survival mode existence that contaminates the larger purposes. 'The purpose of religious life is not survival; it is prophecy. The role of religious life is to bring to visibility what is Good News for our time now, not to preserve a past long gone and no longer germane to the challenge of new questions.'

Indeed, every generation has to address questions that prior generations either found irrelevant, unquestionable, or unspeakable. These always present new challenges, and one of the new challenges as we enter the next century and millennium is the questioning of institutions and foundations themselves, and the very idea of such. The question is no longer 'which institution?', but 'why institutions?' The constant search for 'why?' brings us back to the original intentions of the religious impulse.

For the stewardship of the globe, the extension of justice to all people regardless of age, race, gender, creed, location, and for the true purpose of call to all people, Chittister calls on us to recognise that this is a time to become a new people. 'The truth of the matter is that we cannot claim to be building the new religious life until we call for and form for the new direction. It is too late now to rebuild in the shell of the old. It is time to become a new people again.'

Continuing with the idea of the fire, she relates the story of the Irish custom of starting the first fire in a new home from the already heated coals of fires from other homes of family or community members. The fire must come from somewhere, but in each new home, it blazes anew. The same must be true for the religious life. The first fires are drawn upon, but the current fire is its own blaze. This must be recognised and cultivated. 'We are not the first generation for whom this is the content of our lives, but unless we do it with all our hearts, another generation may not get the opportunity to do the same, to warm themselves at the same fire, to heat the world with the coals of their lives.'

Reading this book has helped stir the coals in my own life, in my own quest. I must re-read it in greater detail and attention, perhaps several times before I get the fullest benefit. I recommend it most highly to those who are seeking, and those who have yet to seek, and those who don't know they should be seekers. While this is done in the context of Benedictine spiritual practice, it is by no means an exclusively Benedictine, or even exclusively Christian, task.

The great Benedictine Roman Catholic nun, the Reverend Sister Joan Chittister, gives us a clear and generous and a fearless voice for Catholic religious life today. She is founder of Benetvision, and past head of US Benedictine Priors, and a prolific and well respected exegetical and spiritual writer. She is a lifelong Benedictine nun and has come through all of the changes as well as anyone else.

At first she was extremely resistant to the ineffable shifts of the Sixties, and then through contemplation and study she came to understand and to implement what was truly valid. She was able to communicate this understnading to others and to guide them gratefully. Her title to this present work describes that process. Although we now may find decimated our once thriving and numerous religious communities, reduced to what appears to be ashes, let us discover and awaken the Holy Spirit's undying eternal Fire in These Ashes.

This is not as empty headed as my too brief summary would indicate. Sister Joan calls us to live honestly and seriously our religious vows and our Catholic religious life to the fullest. For instance, in her section regarding the vow of poverty, she reviews past prevalent shortcomings as others have noted, and in part states strongly:

Surely the vow of poverty is not so simplistic a thing as being secure but not saturated. Vows must be made of sterner stuff than that. In our days at least, when the poorest people on earth watch on television while the richest people on earth feed their animals better food than the poor can feed their children, poverty most certainly obliges us to commit ourselves to the just distribution of the goods of the earth (p. 107).

Certainly the vast poorest of this earth have no television to watch, yet we see with agreement her point, which foretells that made by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI in his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis: el Sacramento de la Caridad: una Exhortacion Apostolica Postsinodal, in which His Holiness exhorts us to work to restrcture those economic structresu which keep the most of us poor and hugry, compelled as we are, in his words, by the Eucharist itself. Sister Joan here also echoes the well received Encyclical of the US Bishops named Economic Justice for All/10th Anniv. Ed. (Publication / United States Catholic Conference).

Sister Joan's meditation on our vow of poverty continues along several valid paths, and concludes, as do so many things in spirituality, with three points:

An authentic spirituality of poverty in a period of massive human want rests on a tripod of virtues: public advocacy, congregational deprivatization and personal conversion (p.108).

Sister Joan then describes these three supports at depth, and this represents only one comprehensive section of her profound treatise.

We find here that Sister Joan expounds a true commitment to her religious life in all of its aspects. Rather than lamenting the loss and the disappointments of the past, as in the book Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns, Sister Joan courageously and openly looks ahead to how and why we live religiously today in America, integrally and whole, honestly and without compromise. This is a great and a stirring book for any Catholic religious to read. It is a clarion call to advance, not to retreat, upon our long road to realizing the Reign of the Prince of Peace and Justice. And as Our Holy Father Saint Benedict desires, may we all get there together.

To live truly our religious vows is to present the Sign of the Cross which counters the materialist, individualist, capitalist, greedy, lustful, warrior, violent, imperialist path of our nation now. By living our vows integrally and honestly and openly we show all the way to Salvation in Jesus Christ. God grant us that courage and grace in these our lost times.

See also please Poverty Celibacy & Obedience : A Radical Option for Life.

I purchased this book for a class I was taking. Fire Officer 100. The book was well written, easy to read and understand. I recomend both the book and the class to anyone that is interestred in becoming an Officer in their fire dept.

After reviewing the two other books of this type available, this one is by far the best. The chapter on CRM is what makes this one heads and tails above the others. If you are thinking of buying this book to read, don't think about it anymore. Buy it!

There is so much great stuff in Caroline Ward's The Four Faces of Woman, that it's tough figuring out where to start. The concept of the four faces is powerful, and Caroline does a fantastic job of educating and enlightening us about each of these. She provides stories that give us a sense of what it's like to wear each face, outlines what you get, what you sacrifice with each, as well as the relationship to time, power, emotion and God.

If the book had only covered the Four Faces, it would be a remarkable accomplishment, yet Caroline gives us even more. She covers the 8 Powers of the Shakti (the fourth face) in brilliant detail with specific ways of relating to the eight powers. She shares exercises used in the Four Faces workshops along with stories from the workshop.

The third segment of the book covers a variety of topics incuding Answering the Why are we Here question, some reflections About Men (since this is primarily a book for women), Energy in Relationship (how to protect yourself from the negative energy of others), dealing with fear, and reflections, provocations and questions about sex.

I probably would not have picked up this book had I not had an earlier connection with Caroline Ward (we both started companies named About People at about the same time and met via email some time ago), but I'm so glad I did. It had a powerful impact on me and I have just ordered a dozen copies to share with friends.

In a strange but wonderful sort of a way, we seem to be traveling a similar path and I feel especially blessed to know that Caroline is out there leading the way for me (and many others). I love the Hopi Elders' Prophecy she includes at the end of the Four Faces, and most especially the last line - We are the ones we've been waiting for.

Thank you Caroline for a great book!

There are four faces that women show the world. There is the Eternal Face, the innocent and genuine self that we all experienced as young children. There is the Traditional Face which we portray as we try to become what everyone else wants us to be. There is the Modern Face which serves as a rebellion from all that the world wants us to be. Finally, there is the Face of the Shakti. This is the face that we wear as we journey back to the Eternal Face. It is in this state that we reclaim our authentic power and open ourselves to the possibilities.

The Four Faces of Woman looks to self understanding and self love no matter which face we might be showing at a given time. Part of the process is to fall back into old habits so that we can know and love ourselves in deeper ways. Ultimately, this is the only way that we can reclaim our Shakti powers: the powers to withdraw, let go, tolerate, accept, discern, decide, face, and cooperate.

I would readily recommend The Four Faces of Woman to all my female friends. This book is empowering, not in a financially successful, kick butt, take over the world sense but in a much more important way. To stand in our own selves. How truly amazing would that be?

So you're familiar with my background, I received a B.S. in Astrophysics and now I am a first year graduate student in an Applied Math program. I used this book as a supplementary resource when studying Partial Differential Equations - we got to Separation of Variables and then to Fourier Series. Every Physics student who graduates today has at least seen a Fourier Series (I hope). I didn't feel confident in my abilities so I bought this book to review.

Let me tell you, if this is your first time hearing about Fourier Series then this book is simply the BEST book to learn Fourier Series and much of the beautiful underlying theory behind Fourier Analysis! It's so well written and clear that I had absolutely no trouble following the text. I cannot express how clear and beautifully it is written, it is extremely rare for a math book at this level to be so vivid and eloquent! The proofs are easy to follow and the problems ease you into the subject presented in each section; which, in turn, are "bite-sized" and manageable. I studied the material by myself and walked away knowing Fourier Series.

There are plenty of good examples, the problems are great! If you're self-studying (or not) do as many of the problems as you can; if you read the previous two or three sections you should have absolutely no trouble going through the problems. Applications galore!

NOTE: This book isn't written at the graduate level, don't shy away from it because I mentioned being a grad student, I just wanted a review of Fourier Series. If I had to rate the level of the book I would say it's at a beginning upper-division level of a typical american university. If you've had a decent multi-variable calculus class, and are comfortable with partial derivatives, this book should be very comprehensible. It's clearer still to physics majors (or the like) who are more familiar with what and where specific equations apply to.

This book is beautiful, and I think it should be required reading of every physics and applied math student everywhere (maybe I'm just a little biased).

The ONLY caveat is that the Fourier Complex Series is left to problems, we don't get to use them to learn theory and get more comfortable with. This is okay since the cosine and sine series are equivalent to the complex series, it's just that the complex series is more elegant when doing problems or proving things.

If you are an advanced undergraduate student or a begining graduate student and want to learn not only the concepts behind Fourier Series but see how it can be applied to boundary value problems of mathematical physics, then this is "the" book you should read. It is well written - easy to understand and illustrated with lots of examples.

I read this book 3 years ago when 2 brethren entered my home and offered their religion as a viable choice to my current religion. The book helped me to ask pertinent questions, especially concerning LDS' version of Biblical history.

I read this book 3 years ago when 2 brethren entered my home and offered their religion as a viable choice to my current religion. The book helped me to ask pertinent questions, especially concerning LDS' version of Biblical history.

This book traces the ancient roots of Freemasonry through the ages. It is awesome in it's depth. A truly fascinating history of Freemasonry from a very different perspective.

This book demonstrates Bro. Ward's belief that the roots of Freemasonry are thousands of years old. In this book (which he never intended to be released to non-masons) he shows that many signs, symbols and rituals are similar through non-connected cultures around the globe over the ages. This is a book that all Freemasons should read and evaluate in their hearts and minds. There is much work to be done.