General Books

Before You Do: Making Great Decisions That You Wont Regret

T.D. Jakes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Before You Do, best selling author T.D. Jakes turns his attention and teachings to the topicof relationships and the issues that need resolving once you've learned to use the spiritual and psychological tools for reevaluating your place in life and for repositioning yourself for a life withoutlimits.

Relationship decisions come down to five crucial components, according to Bishop Jakes: Research: gathering information and collecting data Roadwork: removing obstacles and clearing the path Rewards: listing choices and imaging their consequences Revelation: narrowing your options and making your selectionRearview: looking back and adjusting as necessary to stay on course

Before You Do gets you on the right track to making decisions that you'll be proud of and reap the benefits of for the rest of your life, as will the generations that follow you. He gives you insight on how to reflect, discern, and decide the next step to take to have a strong and enduring love, marriage, and family.

The Bishop takes a spiritual and practical approach to inherently emotional issues such as the outside influences on our relationships, e.g., in-laws, friends, and former spouses; coping with anger; parenting; financial concerns; negotiating high-profile lives; and so many more of the issues people face every day. His special brand of counseling and teaching appeals to the faith-based community and beyond, reaching millions who receive his wisdom in all media, especially books.

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 443 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An invitation to be transformed ... 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Fitting, I think, to be reading what may arguably be one of C. S. Lewis's most important books, on a retreat during which one of my personal goals was to find a spiritual, if not religious, inner peace. Reading the work of C. S. Lewis is to meet a friend who reflects us and understands us--and helps us to understand.

Who of us has not asked these questions? Who of us has not prayed these prayers, even those of us who are atheists (which group has at times included me, and has also included C. S. Lewis), even if only praying to our void? Lewis takes on several of these questions that have held me captive since youth, when I first began to wonder about a God: who He might be, if indeed He is, and what might my relationship be with Him.

Before he has even cleared the pages of the preface, Lewis nabs me cold: "It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise." Then Lewis reminds us that this time of "waiting in the hall" is not a form of camping, but a time of rigorous seeking, questioning, praying even when we are not sure who we are praying to or if we are heard. "And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling."

Christianity, Lewis writes, is a way of life. An owner's manual, if you will. It is not meant to constrain us, but to fully free us. Following its doctrines means to "transform our lives in such a way that evil diminishes and good prevails." There is an innate law, he observes, that follows along the lines of human nature, a natural right and wrong, and in examining all religions, we find right and wrong, good and evil, are more or less defined along the same lines by all humanity, regardless of religious beliefs. This is our first clue that we have found an unchangeable truth. Even the atheist, Lewis says, has a sense of right and wrong, good and bad, and as soon as one realizes this, the next step is to understand the universal standard of morality. From where does this standard come if not from some higher ruling of the universe? It echoes inside each and every one of us. "The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard ..." which is what Lewis terms as "Real Morality."

The God Lewis has us see is not a kindly and bearded man sitting on a throne in some distant and ethereal place. He calls him a great artist, for the universe is a very beautiful place, but also a Being that is intensely interested in right conduct--in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. Insofar as all that, one can think of God as "good." But Lewis does not see Him as an easy master. "There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft."

From here, Lewis proceeds to tackle those common questions: how can God exist in such a cruel and unjust world? If God knows how the story of mankind ends, why did he create us and our story at all? If the future already exists in His eyes, what does that say about free will? How can we know that Christ wasn't simply a great moral teacher, but indeed the Son of God? And, why did Christ have to die, and so cruelly, for our sins to be forgiven? Why could we not just shake hands on it?

Lewis explores free will and how God understood, as we so often have not, that in giving us free will, He gave us the ability to love. It is only when we have to ability to choose, that we can love. Anything else would be forced bondage, slave bowing to master. If we have botched up our ability to choose, so very often throughout our history, then we cannot shake our fists at the heavens and blame God, but must look to ourselves and the choices we have made. Lewis urges us to return to the basics, the Law of Morality, for only in addressing that place where our mistakes were first made can we continue forward in a progressive manner. If we cannot ever achieve perfection, it does not mean we are ever off the hook in striving for it.

Time and what is beyond time, the concepts of heaven and hell, the need to be a part of an active Christian community, what was meant by being formed in the likeness of God (no, we are not his mirror images), the true meaning of charity (far more than the occasional giving of alms to the poor), the meaning of faith and why it should not be blind, what it means to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (and this section made me laugh, perhaps in relief, as Lewis explains that to love our neighbors as ourselves does not mean we have to like our neighbors or even always to be kind to them, no more than we always like ourselves or are kind to ourselves), so Lewis covers all the basics.

There is a very real cost to being a Christian, Lewis teaches. Make no mistake, it is not a small pittance. But it is one that, if we do not pay it, will cost us far more in the long run, and not only after our lives on earth have ended. All that we do, all that we are, here on earth, already comes back to us, with our free will choices following their own natural law of returns.

"God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy," Lewis writes. We are not talking about mere improvement, but transformation. One that we choose to either retreat from, and pay the resulting price, or embrace, and pay that price. To find our own true selves, however, Lewis sums up, can be done only by submitting fully. To let go, and let God.

"The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires ... I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call `me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up ... that I first begin to have a real personality of my own."

Lewis has invited us to enter into this transformation, and he helps us to do so in a manner that is far from blind.

~Abridged from Zinta's Reviews, on blogspot.com, and The Smoking Poet, Fall 2008

Editorial Review:

A forceful and accessible discussion of Christian belief that has become one of the most popular introductions to Christianity and one of the most popular of Lewis's books. Uncovers common ground upon which all Christians can stand together.

Reposition Yourself: Living Life Without Limits

T.D. Jakes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Loved It 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a must read. It covers how to be a person that is true to themselves. This book inspired me to write a poem called falling in love with me and I can't put into words how inspiring this book was. T.D. Jakes covers all the elements on how to grow. I would recommend this book to anyone because it has something in it for everyone.

Editorial Review:

T.D. Jakes offers readers of the New York Times bestseller Reposition Yourself: Living Life Without Limits a collection of scripture and quotes that provides the spiritual underpinnings of his message about applying Christian principles to adjust to the many changes that life brings.

Reposition Yourself, the narrative book, uses wisdom collected from more than thirty years of Jakes's experience counseling and working withhigh-profile and everyday people on financial, relational, and spiritual creativity on the path to an enriched life filled with contentment at every stage.

Reposition Yourself Reflections collects the words that ground Reposition Yourself solidly in biblical teachings. Reflections is an essential keepsake, to carry with you in moments when inspiration and encouragement are needed.

A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 134 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

C.S. Lewis joined the human race when his wife, Joy Gresham, died of cancer. Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he's got an answer for everything, experienced crushing doubt for the first time after his wife's tragic death. A Grief Observed contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: "Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high," Lewis writes. "Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is the book that inspired the film Shadowlands, but it is more wrenching, more revelatory, and more real than the movie. It is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings. --Michael Joseph Gross

The Problem of Pain

C. S. Lewis

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Total reviews: 93 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Problem of Pain answers the universal question, "Why would an all-loving, all-knowing God allow people to experience pain and suffering?" Master Christian apologist C.S. Lewis asserts that pain is a problem because our finite, human minds selfishly believe that pain-free lives would prove that God loves us. In truth, by asking for this, we want God to love us less, not more than he does. "Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect at the opposite pole from Love." In addressing "Divine Omnipotence," "Human Wickedness," "Human Pain," and "Heaven," Lewis succeeds in lifting the reader from his frame of reference by artfully capitulating these topics into a conversational tone, which makes his assertions easy to swallow and even easier to digest. Lewis is straightforward in aim as well as honest about his impediments, saying, "I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine that being made perfect through suffering is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design." The mind is expanded, God is magnified, and the reader is reminded that he is not the center of the universe as Lewis carefully rolls through the dissertation that suffering is God's will in preparing the believer for heaven and for the full weight of glory that awaits him there. While many of us naively wish that God had designed a "less glorious and less arduous destiny" for his children, the fortune lies in Lewis's inclination to set us straight with his charming wit and pious mind. --Jill Heatherly

Dark Night of the Soul

St. John of the Cross

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I became familiar with this when I was in college and I had difficulty with mental illness.

I am very different from other people in the way I think. I have something like severe autism caused by brain injury combined with a high tendency to think about and want to please other people.

today I was thinking about some feedback I got and I realized that it is all going wrong b/c of my tendency to blame others, among other things.

I am very different from other people. I need to work out conversations via grammatical or other, mathematical, rules. this is like autism and it reflects that my injury started to show up in the 6th grade, when I was diagramming sentences.

and the thing is when you are different you want to be the same.

but this book, it doesn't really matter the specifics of the language b/c the concept, of dealing with something huge and coming out the other side, is very important to me.

I am almost 40 and facing this issue.

my tendency is to panic and blame people rather than take responsibility for being different. whatever that means. I don't know what that means.

it's OK, I have to trust that there will be another side for me when I come out of this whatever it is, this passage through acceptance.

Editorial Review:

As a Carmelite monk, the 16th-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross was well trained in the systematic theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. In Dark Night of the Soul, St. John's sharply organized mind gives clean shape to his mystical belief in a loving Being somewhere outside the realm of feeling, thought, or imagination, who can only be known through love. Dark Night of the Soul describes the process of purgation, first of senses, and then of spirit, that precedes the soul's loving Union with God. To quote from this book would detract from the coiled power of its tightly focused picture of the soul's progress; suffice it to say that there has never been a better book for discouraged Christians. When you cannot understand what or why you believe, but you find yourself unable to abandon faith, look to St. John for help. --Michael Joseph Gross

The Four Loves

C.S. Lewis

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Total reviews: 72 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Four Loves summarizes four kinds of human love--affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God. Masterful without being magisterial, this book's wise, gentle, candid reflections on the virtues and dangers of love draw on sources from Jane Austen to St. Augustine. The chapter on charity (love of God) may be the best thing Lewis ever wrote about Christianity. Consider his reflection on Augustine's teaching that one must love only God, because only God is eternal, and all earthly love will someday pass away:

Who could conceivably begin to love God on such a prudential ground--because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving? Would you choose a wife or a Friend--if it comes to that, would you choose a dog--in this spirit? One must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates.

His description of Christianity here is no less forceful and opinionated than in Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain, but it is far less anxious about its reader's response--and therefore more persuasive than any of his apologetics. When he begins to describe the nature of faith, Lewis writes: "Take it as one man's reverie, almost one man's myth. If anything in it is useful to you, use it; if anything is not, never give it a second thought." --Michael Joseph Gross

Lord, I Want to Know You: A Devotional Study on the Names of God

Kay Arthur

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Enjoy the expanded and updated editions of the best-selling "Lord" Bible Study Series from Kay Arthur.  The "Lord" study series is an insightful, warm-hearted Bible study series designed to meet readers where they are--and help them discover God's answers to their deepest needs.

Discover the Limitless Power of God's Name.

        So much of our confusion and pain results because we don't know God -- who He really is, how He works in our lives.
        But with Lord, I Want to Know You, that will all change. When you know God more fully by studying His names -- Creator, Healer, Protector, Provider, and many others -- you'll gain power to stand strong. You'll find strength for times of trial, comfort for pain, provision for your soul's deepest needs. And your walk with God will be transformed.
        Let Kay Arthur guide you through the Scriptures in this deeply insightful study. Your daily time with God in His Word will introduce you to the limitless treasure available to you as His child. And these are truths you can share easily with others, individually or in small groups.

The Abolition of Man

C. S. Lewis

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Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical. In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality; and even if Lewis seems a bit too cranky and privileged for his arguments to be swallowed whole, at least his articulation of values seems less ego-driven, and therefore is more useful, than that of current writers such as Bill Bennett and James Dobson. --Michael Joseph Gross

So What's the Difference?

Fritz Ridenour

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

comparison of religions 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This simple book, easy to read, is a good reference for anyone wanting a comparison of the world religions. It is fair and balanced.

So that's the difference... 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Ridenour probably wouldn't sit next to me in church but he has compiled a good elementary look into other religions. I don't know that I agreed with his classification of cults versus religion so maybe he should do away with the distinction in the book.

Overall I got what I was looking for but this is certainly not an unbiased look at all religions.

Editorial Review:

So What's the Difference has been revised and updated for the 21st Century to help Christians better understand their own beliefs. A classic first released in 1967, this revision takes a current look at the answer to the question, "How does orthodox biblical Christianity differ from other faiths?" In a straightforward, non-critical comparison, Fritz Ridenour explores and explains the basic tenets of 20 worldviews, religions and faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, New Age and Mormonism.