Ward Books

"For This Child I Pray; A Father's Prayer Journal" is an absolutely beautiful idea: a directed prayer journal for Christian fathers. Each two pages offers a relevant scripture and a thoughtful quote, and focus prayer statements where the father then adds his own specific prayers for himself and for his child on a subject. For example, one page asks ' As a father, I pray for the correct definition of success specifically in ....' and 'Today God, help my child succeed in....' - the father fills in the rest. The way it's laid out and written is concise and easy and would not involve hours of journaling - I can see a Dad spending maybe 15 minutes for each two page section. A Dad could either use one journal for more than one child or could dedicate a separate journal to each child. The picture on the front really grabs father's hearts (I tested it on my husband and he was totally hooked at first glance). I think I have not seen a better tool for men's spiritual growth, for enhancing a father's awareness of his own influence, for reflection on parenting, and praying with wisdom for his children. This will capture every Christian Dad's heart and the heart of his child. This would make an exceptional gift or keepsake. Ron DiCianni also has written a prayer journal for mothers. If there is a wait for delivery, it will be worth it.

I have owned and used "The Formula Book" and "The Formula Book 2" since they were published in 1975. I raised my family and pets from the formulas in them. Being a nurse with a very large family, these books are still relavent in today's economy and THEY WORK! We made toothpaste, skin preparations, animal soaps and many other things that today cost a fortune. When you have seven to ten teenagers, six dogs, a Scandanavian raccoon and at least six cats in your home, unusual things can happen and the cost can be extravagant. I still use these books to this day and, thanks to Amazon.com, I am sharing them with friends. By the way, I am a Kansas City girl, showing that good comes from a great place!!!!!!!

Despair and depression are I guess , the mood of most people at one time or another of their lives. For some people however it is the dominant note, the prevailing feeling and totally takes over their lives. Why this happens and to whom exactly it happens whole Literatures, including my guess is the psychiatric and neuroscience literatures can give only partial answers to. However ' despair ' becomes especially problematic and interesting when it happens in the lives of those who are our spiritual models , and who in the Hasidic tradition are to continually be clinging to and uplifted by the Presence of God.
How explain the fall and the darkness?
Elie Wiesel tells the individual story of four great Hasidic masters and their particular struggles with their own inner darkness.
My only Holy Teacher the late Dovid Hertzberg who loved these Hasidic masters with all his soul, and taught their Torahs with such love and inspiration once suggested ( And this is not his suggestion alone) that the great Kotzker went into his ten year period of isolation and solitude because the sufferings of his own Hasidim ( It was his task to listen to them and help them) became so great that they overwhelmed him completely i.e. The despair was not a private despair of an individual for himself but a despair which came out of his love of his own Hasidim and people. Perhaps, even a holy despair.

This volume is the basic text on interpreting natural and induced fractures in core. It is essential reading for any geologist engaged in core description. The book includes careful discussions of how to distinguish natural fractures from induced fractures, how to describe fractures and why this is important, and how to record your observations. It is well illustrated with photos and drawings.
Two of the authors (Kulander and Dean) were authors of the 1979 U.S. DOE publication "The application of fractography to core and outcrop fracture investigations" which marked the beginning of geological fractography. Unfortunately, Reagan-era budget cutting resulted in destruction of the original printed copies of this seminal volume. That work is still available via microfilm, but the excellent photos that are the heart of the work are unreadable black blobs in the microfilm reproductions.
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This audio rated better than the DVD because although it has the same stories in the DVD (the book has different ones, pity they don't record them also), you get what you pay for which is just the fairytales and not any extra non related promotional hype. Close you eyes and you can "see" the characters come to life with the voice overs, this is just like the cartoons without the pictures. Terrific for the car, as a bedtime story, or for people like me who won't fully grow up, it is great to play whilst I am doing other creative activities and need some background nonsense to bring back the memories.

Richard J. Ward has written a sensitive and inspiring memoir of the love of his life, his late wife Cecilia. Going through her personal items after her death, he discovers how very precious a lady she truly was. Always the caring wife and mother, she always placed her family's well-being and triumphs before her own-not as a martyr but as a cheerful companion on the journey of their life. Accomplished as a radio broadcaster and as a hostess, she took pride in her husband and children's achievements. Even in the face of difficulties such as moving to Jordan with four small children and later in life, dealing with her blindness, she remained a gracious lady rising above all life's trials with gallantry and Herculean strength. Richard Ward's tender memories have given the reader a view of a truly remarkable woman much-loved in life and dearly-missed after her death.

Anyone who reads this book will become --- if they are not already --- an admirer of the author's parents, Frank (Sheed) and Maisie (Ward); and will be moved to laughter and to tears in tracing the fortunes of this exceptionally talented, quirky, and rollicking Catholic family.

It is odd, and it can provoke a bit of hand-wringing in some readers, that although Wilfrid remembers his mother tenderly and clearly idolizes his father --- and who wouldn't be smitten by Frank's goodness? --- he has rejected in his own life the very core of his parents' character, their strong, sound Catholic Faith. It makes some of Wilfrid's narrative, though affectionate, sound just a tad patronizing: the agnostic son "explaining" his parent's religious fervor to a supercilious and secular world.

But I decided to give Frank & Maisie 5 stars anyway; partly to bring up their overall average (permit me to do this!) and partly because I appreciate the fact that Son Wilfrid NEVER falls into the all-too-common all-warts, my-parents-done-me-wrong genre. Far from it. He has gifted the world with a fundamentally positive and loving re-telling of the family epic, full of wit and drollery but serious for all that.

Through this book I actually met Frank & Maisie: met them, appreciated them, loved them. For this I owe Wilfrid many heartfelt thanks. And five stars for gratitude.

The story of Frank Kingdon Ward and his exploration of this remote unexplored part of Tibet is marvelous. His writing flows, he takes hardship and danger placidly, and his descriptions are wonderful. The photos and maps make you feel as if you are there with him, knowing his porters, the village people and friends. This is a great book to add to your collection of favorites.

In a world where almost everywhere has been explored, it is exciting to read about the world's deepest ravine, almost inaccessible, full of vigin forest, strange plants, and animals, and still not fully explored either by Chinese or Westerners. Frank Kingdon Ward explored it in the 1920s, in what was then Tibet, leaving a stretch of several miles unknown to all but the local tribes. His original book is reproduced as the core of the present one (with some editing of his words to remove comments that would today be viewed as unacceptably racist). There are also accounts of earlier explorations of the region, including the wild borderlands of India to the south, choked by subtropical forests and then populated with violent tribes (this border region is still disputed by China and India). Kingdon Ward was a botanist, focusing on the plant life of the gorge, whereas the new book gives accounts by modern explorers and covers additional aspects, such as Tibetan religion. There are some fascinating photographs: black and white ones by Kingdon Ward and modern color ones. Two I particularly like are the same view of mountains and old-growth forest taken from a cave where Kingdon Ward camped in the 1920s. One is Kingdon Ward's photograph, and the other is taken some 75 years later, with individual trees grown larger, a large glacier melted away, and the treeline higher up the mountains. Recent, separate expeditions by Western and Chinese teams in the 1990s have shrunk the unexplored stretch of the gorge to about three miles. The discoveries of the Westerners are described and illustrated in the book, including a "new" waterfall. Unfortunately, though, politics make an unwelcome intrusion at the end of the story.

This brief but expansive treatise on Free Speech in the Catholic Church bears the Church's official approbation indicated by the Imprimatur issued in 1959 by then Vicar General of Westminister, the Rev. E Morrogh Bernard, and the Nihil Obstat issued by the Censor Deputatis, Adrianus Van Vleit, Doctor of Theology, and is thus found to be free of any doctrinal and moral error which would obstruct its publication as a work of Catholic theology.

You may take a while to grow accustomed to the dialectic rhetoric of Father Rahner, one of the most important and influential Catholic theologians of that crucial era, as he appears to advance in steps, placing one leg before the other. And yet his message grows clear, and a prophetic clarion cry for our current often oppressive ecclesiology.

Father Rahner draws his theme from a public pronouncement by Pope Pius XII published in the official newspaper of the Vatican, Osservatore Romano, in February 18, 1950: "Finally, I should like to add a word about public opinion within the fold of the Church ( . . .) Only people who know little or nothing about the Catholic Church will be surprised to hear this. For she too is a living body, and there would be something missing from her life if there were no public opinion within her, a defect for which pastors as well as the faithful would be responsible. . . . (pp. 14-15)"

Father Rahner then defines this for-then new concept of public opinion, how it is manipulated, how it is truly discerned, and what role it has ever played within the Catholic Church. Father Rahner develops the Papal statement that we would have a defect in not hearing public opinion truly, for which the pastors themselves would be responsible.

Father Rahner interprets one part of this Papal declaration thusly: "The existence of a public opinion is justified by the fact that the Church is a society of human beings and that human societies essentially involve public opinion. Any attempt to stifle it would be a mistake, for which both clergy and faithful would be held responsible."

Interestingly he finds one means of hearing public opinion is listening to the reactions of the public to various extraordinary statements by theologians. He therefore declares theologians not to be condemned for proposing new ideas and redefinitions, as through this process of dialogue and conversation we may hear truth. He also has some very wise and kind words for those theologians who dare propose new ways of expressing the eternal truths, to the inevitable condemnation of some uncomprehending fellow believers.

Father Rahner, writing in the late fifties and fully conscious of the horrors of totalitarian states, continues: "In an age of totalitarian states, when individuality is suppressed and 'ideology' supplied, the Church has to delimit her position more clearly, to prevent her own character and nature from being confused with those of a totalitarian state. ( . . .) the Church is not a totalitarian religious state no matter what so many people outside the Church may think and say to the contrary. (p. 17)"

Father Rahner continues, ever under the auspices of the Nihil Obstat, concluding, " . . .men's thoughts and feelings should not be prescribed for them (p. 21)," expressing in these words a strong sense of true and traditional ecclesiology we need to recall now in this brave new era of oaths of fidelity which a priori dictate a false and unholy obedience of judgment and of thought, which smell more of totalitarianism and not of the freely flowing Holy Spirit.

Indeed, Father Rahner finds: "Catholics must be allowed ( . . .) to talk their heads off (p. 25)" and to be heard. He further states: "It is well for us to bear in mind the fact that, in the sphere in which public opinion has a part to play, Church authorities have no gift of infallibility ( . . .) they are not infrequently in danger, for the same reasons, of knowing only a limited, merely 'clerical' and traditionally sheltered segment of real life and the real position. If they do not allow the people to speak their minds, do not, in more dignified language, encourage or even tolerate, with courage and forbearance and even a certain optimism free from anxiety, the growth of a public opinion within the Church, they run the risk of directing her from a soundproof ivory tower, instead of straining their ears to catch the voice of God, which can also be audible within the clamour of the times. (p. 26)"

But certainly I tax your patience with merely a glimpse at less than a quarter of this amazing and eye-opening and essential examination of our ecclesiology and our role within our Church, this theological treatise so accessible to us now a half century later and which bears the official and ancient Imprimatur permitting its publication as a Catholic text, and the Nihil Obstat granted by an official Church censor having evaluated it by the Church's objective, moral and doctrinal criteria. Please read this rather brief yet profound book with confidence and with Faith, and speak freely within Our Church, with the charity and the humility which has ever been our hallmark.