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Journals of Jim Elliot, The

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A different time - to our shame 4 out of 5 stars.
21 of 21 people found this review helpful.

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

And so was Jim Elliot, martyr at the hands of South American Indians who later gave their lives to Christ. In this, his autobiography via his journals, we see the life this young man led and the preordained road that led him to gain what he could not lose.

"The Journals of Jim Elliot" had a profound effect on me as a young man as I happened to be at a similar stage in life as Elliot during most of the pages. What I found on those pages - the lifeblood of a man fully sold out to God - changed my life.

A long book, "tJoJE" calls anyone who wants to know how to live a committed Christian life throughout the slow unfolding of Elliot's life. As an encouragement to young men, it is peerless. Its only detraction is due to the very nature of the autobiographical style as derived from journal entries. While you see God's hand moving in Elliot's life, sometimes the nature of the entries is lost, slow-moving, or repetitive. Such is the style of the book.

However, what I found most helpful in reading this book is the stark contrast between Christian practice of fifty-plus years ago and today. Elliot was distinctly a man of his time, but he was not alone in his complete surrender to God. He was surrounded by many people who were like him. How he lived, thought, and died seems foreign to today's Christians. In fact, he shares more with a Christian of two hundred years ago in David Brainerd than anyone you typically find in a pew today. His example is so profound that it is hard not to feel that something has changed in the last couple decades. Somewhere there are men like Jim Elliot today; I hope I can find them and learn from their examples, as well.

Anyone who stays with "The Journals of Jim Elliot" will find a great reward in its pages. It has always been one of my favorite Christian books. If you want a book that offers something different, it is a soul-stirring story made more compelling by its truthful historicity.

Editorial Review:

Jim Elliot was part of a team of young missionaries murdered in Ecuador in 1956 by the Auca Indians to whom they were witnessing. At the age of 29, he left behind a young widow, a baby daughter, and volumes of personal journals written over many years. In 1978, Revell published the complete and unabridged journals, edited by his widow, Elisabeth, and the journals have stayed in print ever since. And it's no wonder-Jim Elliot was an intelligent thinker and strong writer in these personal, yet universal, musings about faith, work, and love. The Journals of Jim Elliot is a wonderful account of the life of a man who yearns to know God's plan for his life, details his fascinating missions work, and loves Elisabeth- first as a single man, then as a happily married one. The Journals of Jim Elliot will intrigue fans of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, readers interested in missions, and young people struggling to find God's plan for their lives.

The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader

Jonathan Edwards

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader is the first published anthology of sermons by the most influential American Puritan of the 18th century. Some people think Edwards is scary, because his most famous fire-and-brimstone preaching ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") is too severe for today. But this book demonstrates that Edwards is equally capable of rapture, of reason, and of relating to a great variety of Christian experiences. The following passage, from a sermon called "Heaven Is a World of Love," is timeless in its sensibilities: "[B]y living a life of love ... you will be in the way to heaven. As heaven is a world of love, so the way to heaven is the way of love. This will best prepare you for heaven, and make you meet for an inheritance with the saints in that land of light and love. And if ever you arrive at heaven, faith and love must be the wings which must carry you there."

The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards contains 14 sermons (of the more than 1,200 that Edwards preached), including five that have not previously been published. A smart introduction describes the sermons' historical context (some were preached to white congregations, others to Native Americans; all were delivered in the volatile period between the Salem witch trials and the American Revolution) and their literary structure. (Each sermon starts with a Scripture text and brief comment or interpretation; makes a simple statement of doctrine that will be presented in the sermon; and then proceeds with various defenses, applications, and uses of the doctrine, which address the immediate personal and social concerns of the listeners.) As a collection, the editors note, "the sermons have a sense of progression to them that reflects the pilgrimage of the soul ... from its sinful earthly state to a pure heavenly existence." A sermon called "The Way of Holiness," preached when Edwards was a teenager, explains what each step in the soul's pilgrimage should be like, urging believers to live so as to deepen the "likeness in nature between God and the soul of the believer." Edwards's own credo, written when he was 19, declares his intention to follow such a pilgrimage, "to live with all my might, while I do live." --Michael Joseph Gross

The Technological Society

Jacques Ellul

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Technique - the bedrock of the modern world 5 out of 5 stars.
50 of 51 people found this review helpful.

Before proceeding with this review, let me just say that no fewer than a hundred pages could be trimmed from its content without diluting its message at all. Many of the examples used in the book are extremely dated; while I think I'm fairly well read, I confess that I'm not really up on the vicissitudes and catfights of French academic sociology in the early 1960's (to give but one example). With that being said, this book is worth well worth the time spent reading its 436 pages.

This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the twentieth century, and if you accept its thesis you won't be able to look at the political milieu in the same way ever again. (If you agree with it and it doesn't change the way you look at things, you haven't grasped its importance.) Most political theorists take ideology to be a central point from which "real world" consequences emanate. In other words, a Communist or libertarian ideology in practical use will produce a particular type society and individual divorced from the actual technical workings of the society. Liberals and conservatives both speak of things in such a manner as if ideology is the prima facie cause of existence - but as Ellul shows in painstaking detail, this is wrong. What almost everyone fails to grasp is the pernicious effect of technique (and its offspring, technology) on modern man.

Technique can loosely be defined as the entire mass of organization and technology that has maximum efficiency as its goal. Ellul shows that technique possesses an impetus all its own and exerts similar effects on human society no matter what the official ideology of the society in question is. Technique, with its never-ending quest for maximum efficiency, tends to slowly drown out human concerns as it progresses towards its ultimate goal. "...the further economic technique develops, the more it makes real the abstract concept of economic man." (p. 219) Technique does not confine itself merely to the realm of technical production, but infiltrates every aspect of human existence, and has no time for "inefficiencies" caused by loyalties to family, religion, race, or culture; a society of dumbed-down consumers is absolutely essential to the technological society, which must contain predictable "demographics" in order to ensure the necessary financial returns. "The only thing that matters technically is yield, production. This is the law of technique; this yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul, and this implies the exploitation of all human psychic forces." (p. 324).

Ellul thoroughly shows that much of the difference in ideology between libertarians and socialists becomes largely irrelevant in the technological society (this is not to say that ideology is unimportant, but rather that technique proceeds with the same goals and effects.) This will doubtlessly please no one; liberals want to believe that they can have privacy and freedom despite a high degree of central planning, and libertarians want to believe that a society free of most regulation and control is possible in an advanced technological society. Libertarian fantasies seem especially irrelevant given the exigencies of a technological society; as Ellul notes, as technique progresses it simply cannot function without a high degree of complexity and regulation. "The modern state could no more be a state without techniques than a businessman could be a businessman without the telephone or the automobile... not only does it need techniques, but techniques need it. It is not a matter of chance, nor a matter of conscious will; rather, it is an urgency..." (p. 253-254). Can anyone really doubt Ellul here, especially seeing as how twenty-plus years of conservative promises to downsize government still result in more regulation and bureaucracy with every passing year? Planning, socialism, regulation, and control are the natural consequences of technique; an increasingly incestuous relationship between industry and the State is inevitable. "The state and technique - increasingly interrelated - are becoming the most important forces in the modern world; they buttress and reinforce each other in their aim to produce an apparently indestructible, total civilization." (p. 318).

This is not an optimistic book. Given that the nature of technique is one of a universal leveling of human cultures, needs, and desires (replacing real needs with false ones and the neighborhood restaurant with McDonalds), Ellul is certainly pessimistic. He does not propose any remedies for the Skinnerist nightmares of technique somehow leading to a Golden Age of humanity, where people will enjoy maximal freedom coupled with minimal want: "...we are struck by the incredible naivete of these scientists... they claim they will be in a position to develop certain collective desires, to constitute certain homogeneous social units out of aggregates of individuals, to forbid men to raise their children, and even to persuade them to renounce having any... at the same time, they speak of assuring the triumph of freedom and of the necessity of avoiding dictatorship... they seem incapable of grasping the contradiction involved, or of understanding that what they are proposing." (p. 434).

Selected Writings (Penguin Classics)

Meister Eckhart

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The best single volume I have seen 5 out of 5 stars.
65 of 66 people found this review helpful.

There are a lot of Meister Eckart books around, but this is the best I have seen. The introduction is especially illuminating. Oliver Davies dispenses with scholastic writings and materials related to the heresy charges, focusing, chronologically, on instructional works and sermons. The Meister Eckhart that emerges from these pages is one who, while taking good works and devotional practices for granted, is so immersed in the Christianized, Neo-Platonic inner life, that he appears, at times, totally unorthodox, at other times, wholly traditional. Reading him is a mind altering experience not to be missed. The translations are very good, and puzzling passages are annotated. References to ancient authors are likewise noted. As a side issue, several of the sermons contain glimpses of medieval scientific theory.

Editorial Review:

Composed during a critical time in the evolution of European intellectual life, the works of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) are some of the most powerful medieval attempts to achieve a synthesis between ancient Greek thought and the Christian faith. Writing with great rhetorical brilliance, Eckhart combines the neoplatonic concept of oneness - the idea that the ultimate principle of the universe is single and undivided - with his Christian belief in the Trinity, and considers the struggle to describe a perfect God through the imperfect medium of language. Fusing philosophy and religion with vivid originality and metaphysical passion, these works have intrigued and inspired philosophers and theologians from Hegel to Heidegger and beyond.

The Waste Land and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics)

T.S. Eliot

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."

As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.

In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.

Gandhi the Man: The Story of His Transformation

Eknath Easwaran

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Readable and inspiring 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a very readable and insiring book about one of the greatest figures of the 20th century, with many photos that make Gandhi's life feel even more real. The effectiveness of Gandhi's application of nonviolence is well explained, both in his life history and in an interesting appendix about nonviolence in the world today.

Gandhi; his life is his message 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The outstanding story of Gandhi's life shows us how a shy, insecure young man could transform himself into a political, social and spiritual giant. Gandhi, as a supreme representative of a very old culture, understood the momentum of the age he lived in and was able to translate his wisdom into practical solutions using the power of non-violence. Amongst others, he convinced the British to leave India, and was the living example of the power of love, respect and non-violence. Illustrating the power of universal truths common to all religions I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in human values and our future.

Editorial Review:

Gandhi the Man tells how Gandhi remade himself from a shy, tongue-tied, average little man to a Mahatma whose life can serve as an inspiration for our own transformation.

The Mantram Handbook 4 Ed

Eknath Easwaran

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An Incredibly Easy Way to Relax and Focus 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

My husband read this book, and recommended that I read it as I mostly confidently, though sometimes stressfully, waded through the challenges of opening my own small business. Within the first few short chapters, Mr. Easwaran gives you a tip for remaining calm and focused, that is as easy as repeating the same few words silently to yourself. Like most of you, I have my family, friends, church, and colleagues for support, but many times, I just want to "take care of myself," get past the hurdle immediately before me, and move on. Using one of the mantra's suggested in this book has helped calm my mind. With a calm mind, I'm able to get in touch with what is really important to me, and make sound, positive decisions. The author then goes on to suggest some additional concepts which I found to be very thought provoking, including, reminding me of the part I can play in life by offering my services to society.

Editorial Review:

Every person has ways of dealing with life's challenges, but these resources are often locked beneath layers of stress and anxiety. Focused repetition of a mantram, or holy name, provides a simple, effective way to regain one's natural clarity, energy, confidence, and control. The good news is that the mantram's power to heal, calm, and restore is available to anyone.

Voice of the Poet: T.S. Eliot (Voice of the Poet)

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

You can hear The Waste Land as it was meant to be heard. T. S. Eliot's reading made the poem come alive. Be warned. Not all of the CD is high quality recordings. Some have background noise. Some are low quality. I don't think the tracks are listed anywhere, so I'll list them for you.

1. La Figlia Che Piange
2. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
3. Gerontion
4. Sweeney Among the Nightingales
5. The Waste Land
6. The Hollow Men
7. The Journey of the Magi
8. Ash-Wednesday
9. East Coker

This is worth it for The Wate Land alone. The rest is just icing on the cake.

Just a wonderful experience. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

It is a great experience to hear the voice of this master poet.

Reading the peoms the way they were meant to be read. 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This audio CD is a must-have for all fans of T. S. Eliot. Poetry is supposed to be read out loud; it is a pleasure and privilege to hear one of the greatest poets of the 20th century read his poems out loud, allowing us to hear the lines the way they were meant to be heard--and read.

This collection contains a short book with an introduction by J. D. McClatchy and the text of all the poem found on the audio CD. The CD contains 9 tracks: La Figlia Che Piange, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, The Journey of the Magi, Ash-Wednesday, and East Coker. The poems are arranged in chronological order, offering insights into the development of both language and themes throughout Eliot's career.

The first track, "La Figlia Che Piange," is one of Eliot's earliest poems and explores, like much of his earlier poetry, the frustrations of a young man and thwarted love. It is a lovely short poem, full of the images that Eliot is well known for. Published at the same time (in the same volume in fact) was also "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." One of the most well known poems, "The Love Song" is a culmination of Eliot's early poetry.

The highlight of the CD is the reading of "The Waste Land." The epic poem is the longest found in this collection, going over 25 minutes. "The Waste Land" by far is one of my personal favorites and I have read it countless of time. However, reading the poem along with this CD has allowed me to shed new meaning to this enormously difficult and marvelous poem. Eliot dramatizes his reading, allowing the dozens of narratives and narrators to come through. Spinning a multifaceted account of the deterioration of society in the early 20th century, a collage of the decay of love and fidelity, a haunting vision of the death of man and his rebirth; all shifting through time and space, drawing upon different histories and languages and cultures, all coalesced through the eyes of Tiresias. Indeed, "a heap of broken images."

"The Hollow Men" is the worst quality recording found on this CD. However it is still evocative as ever. Eliot's hypnotizing monotone, which prevails much of his readings, is exetremely effective in this case, bringing to life the hopelessness and stagnation of the hollow men.

"The Journey of the Magi" is a particularly fitting poem for December and the holiday season. It marks a progression of Eliot's poetry to more theological themes yet still picks on Eliot's fascination with death and rebirth, ending and beginnings.

"East Coker" is the second highlight of the CD. It is the last track and also one of the last poems Eliot composed before his death in 1965. "East Coker" is the second volume in his masterpiece "The Four Quartets." The poem draws upon Eliot's study into Christianity, philosophy, and mysticism. It is a deep exploration of the meaning of time and change. The poem is almost 15 minutes on the CD. Eliot's reading highlights his supreme command of the English language, his sophistication in diction, rhythm and meter. The first and last of the "East Coker" is engraved on Eliot's grave site in England as his chosen epitaph: in my beginning is my end, in my end is my beginning.

This is a well chosen collection of poems which highlights the body of Eliot's work. Hearing the poems being read by their author is a valuable experience. I definitely recommend this to anyone who reads Eliot and would like to learn more about his poetry.

Editorial Review:

Featuring rare archival recordings of the featured poet reading his own work! Each program in Random House Audio Voices' exclusive THE VOICE OF THE POET series is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.

The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Volume I [India's timeless and practical scripture presented as a manual for everyday use]

Eknath Easwaran

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Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Makes the Gita more accessible and gives food for thought 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Easwaran, a contemporary Hindu spiritual teacher presents the Bhagavad Gita, explained verse by verse with the help of anecdotes that range from the classics of Indian and English literature to gently humorous stories drawn from his own life in India and in Berkeley, California.

This three-volume project took ten years; he did it out of inspiration for Gandhi who was said to have used the Gita as a manual of everyday conduct.

The Gita starts out with the young warrior-prince Arjuna facing an enemy host across a battlefield; he despairs because the enemy is his own extended family. How can he fight them?

His charioteer and good friend is Lord Krishna whom he apparently doesn't know is the avatar of God. Krishna gives him a pep-talk about his duty, and thus does the Gita explode into a huge metaphor about the battlefield within oneself where one must go to extinguish ego and "separateness" and realize that all things are one with God.

I don't know how easily I could read the unadorned verses because it just goes on forever with Arjuna occasionally asking a worried question which prompts yet more instruction from Lord Krishna. But with Easwaran's interpretations, it's very enjoyable and clear.

I can't read too much at one sitting because the message of unity in God becomes way too repetitive for me. But it's a nice edition with each verse shown in Sanskrit characters and then English. Volume One took me about a month to read, progressing at a few pages every night.

Editorial Review:

India's timeless and practical scripture presented as a manual for everyday use. This is the first of three volumes and contains preface, introduction, chapters 1-6 of The Bhagavad Gita with commentary, followed by a glossary to Sanskrit terms. 430 pages

Meister Eckhart: The celebrated 14th Century mystic and scholastic: A central source and inspiration of dominant currents in philosophy and theology since Aquinas, w/the text of his historic Defense

Meister Eckhart

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

good introduction, but dated 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Worth it if you're new to Eckhart and want a primary text. But if you're looking for the best introduction, you want Bernard McGinn's text: Meister Eckhart, the Man from whom God hid Nothing.

Yes, this translation is dated, which makes some passages harder than necessary; but this little classic is still being used even in places like Yale, where I first read it three years ago.

If The Only Prayer I Ever Prayed Was 'Thanks'....It Would Be Enough 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 21 people found this review helpful.

"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice."

Wow.

I love that. I really, really love that because it really allows me to know, to feel, to sense at such a deep and centered level of my being, that really, God has given me everything that I could possibly want or need or desire; it's always right where I am because the Holy (the Whole of) Spirit is within me and around me now.

And because this is True of me, I know this to be True of you, as well.

This is such a great read. It's heavy duty stuff. It's passionate, it's alive, it's filled with vibrancy and Light...but what do you expect from a man who also said that "The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me."

People didn't get Meister Eckhart. People still don't get Meister Eckhart. But then again, people don't get people who really know and feel and sense God with every breath in...and with every breath out. It's funny how we make it okay to believe in God, but the moment you claim to say that God is within you and you are within God, people begin to get a little weirded out.

Why? Because we have this invested interest in somehow thinking we're separate from the Divine. We can't begin to think that everyone is an incarnation of the Spirit, can we? Afterall, man is a "sinner"...

Yes, we are sinners...but to sin means to make a mistake in judgment, to err, to miss the mark and we have made the biggest mistake of them all by thinking we are only human.

"The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge."

God is right where we are! Always! We must abandon these ideas that we are "worms of the dust" that God is displeased with us, that God is always ready to condemn us. Jesus said, "God is Love". God is Love...think about that for the next twenty years of your life...if God is Love, then it must mean we are Love, too, for it clearly states in Genesis, "Let us them make him in our Image and Likeness..."

The religionists do not want you to hear things like this. They will tell you it is blasphemy. They will tell you it is propaganda. They will quote all sorts of verses to you from scripture telling you that you are wrong.

Go with the peace you came in with and peacefully and quietly shake the dust from your sandals and move onward. Leave their church and their overcrowded parking lots. The only reason why their message is heard is because FEAR sells; it always did and sadly, it always will.

Meister Eckhart was almost tried for heresy. Fortunately, he died before he was tried. Fortunately, some of his writings survived. You can kill a person, but you cannot kill the truth because the Truth is forever and it will forever assert itself. Not out of brute force, but from a quiet and still place.

If you are ready to know that God is really for you, and could never be against you, I suggest getting this book. Like one reader suggested, he takes one reading a day and meditates upon it. I promise you, if you are open to God, God will open Itself to you in ways too wondrous to even try to explain.

"A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there."

Go into the depths of your being and begin to know the Living God that knows you only as It knows Itself.

Peace and Blessings...

Editorial Review:

1941. The author translates about one-half of Eckhart's works in this volume and presents a background into Eckhart's life and work. Contents: Meister Eckhart's talks of instruction; Book of Divine Comfort; Aristocrat; About Disinterest; 28 sermons; fragments; legends; the defense; a short bibliography.