Built around 500 questions that teens frequently ask about faith, life, and love, this book provides biblically based answers--written just for them--using their language and cultural references.

Questionnaires are widely used in the social sciences and very often survey data form the basis for governmental and commercial planning or evaluation. Yet the quality of survey data is not attested to, since a large variety of factors in the language-use situation prove to influence the answers unintentionally. The forbid/allow asymmetry is a well-known example of this: when respondents are asked whether something should be forbidden, about 50% may answer ‘yes, forbid’ – whereas an equivalent question phrased with the verb ‘to allow’ could well cause up to 75% of the respondents to answer ‘no, it should not be allowed’. Which question wording is preferable to measure respondents’ true attitudes? Only when we know why the answers differ, can we decide on that. This book is the first to apply a systematic cognitive approach to describe the causes of the forbid/allow asymmetry. The question-answering process is unravelled by a variety of experiments and meta-analytic techniques. Analyses reveal that the difference in question wording does not prompt respondents to retrieve different attitudes. Instead, the asymmetry reflects that the question wording causes the response options to be used differently. Because of the qualifying dimensions in the question text, the meanings of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ change, as well as the cognitive distance between them. This study sheds a different light on processes of question-answering and text interpretation. Furthermore, practical advice on questionnaire design and on the interpretation of survey data is given on the basis of these new insights.

What do you do when your whole spiritual life falls apart? It is in these heart-hungry moments—when we feel overwhelmed or alone, struggle with unanswered prayers, aren’t sure what to do, or are crying out for God’s help—that we are surprisingly poised to pray the most effective kinds of prayers possible. Extreme Prayer taps into that longing for connection with God when we need it most by teaching us to pray the kinds of prayers Jesus promised to answer with unlimited power. It’s not about how to pray more . . . it’s about praying differently, and intentionally tapping into all of Jesus’s open-ended promises in a way that achieves maximum Kingdom impact. In Extreme Prayer, Greg Pruett searches the Scriptures to discover the kinds of prayers that God has promised to answer, challenging you to access their power and see His immeasurable glory unleashed in your prayer life.

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, Plato’s Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology but the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not only argument; it is also play. Careful analysis of each layer of the text leads cumulatively to a picture of the dialogue’s underlying structure, related to both argument and myth, and shows that a dynamic link exists between Diotima’s higher mysteries and the organization of the dialogue as a whole. On this basis the authors argue that the Symposium, with its positive theory of art contained in the ascent to the Beautiful, may be viewed as a companion piece to the Republic, with its negative critique of the role of art in the context of the Good. Following Nietzsche’s suggestion and applying criteria developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, they further argue for seeing the Symposium as the first novel. The book concludes with a comprehensive reevaluation of the significance of the Symposium and its place in Plato’s thought generally, touching on major issues in Platonic scholarship: the nature of art, the body-soul connection, the problem of identity, the relationship between mythos and logos, Platonic love, and the question of authorial writing and the vanishing signature of the absent Plato himself.

A guide to preparing for the ACT, based on the Princeton Review coaching course, offers advice on test-taking, specific suggestions for each section of the exam, and three full-length practice exams with answers and explanations.