Psychological insight, theological understanding, and biblical metaphor combine here to offer solid help for a little-understood aspect of the minister's task. What is the minister to do when confronted with opposition from his or her own congregation, when met with frustration in his or her ministry? With empathy for both the minister's plight and the congregation's pain, James Dittes shows how these very frustrations can be the beginning of real and healing ministry. When the people abandon the intimacy and openness of the church with appeals for agenda and rigidity, when projects begun with enthusiasm collapse in apathy, when the people demand that the minister conform to their image of him or her: all these bespeak a need, even an unspoken pain, underlying the surface conflict. At the very point the minister most feels the desire to pack up and move on his people may most need him to stay. 'When the People Say No' will help every minister recognize this enigmatic call and meet it with a creative and healing response.

Charles Robert Maturin's first novel, Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio, was published in 1807. Maturin's dark tale of the brothers Ippolito and Annibal Montorio is a complexly plotted adventure, full of "strong and vigorous fancy, with great command of language," according to Sir Walter Scott. Maturin's relish for the gothic and horrid, so brilliantly exploited in his masterpiece of 1820, Melmoth the Wanderer, here makes its first appearance, and the themes that haunted the later novel find their initial expression in Fatal Revenge. Maturin's unique talents of "darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad; of painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed," make Fatal Revenge a compelling essay into the twilight world of the late gothic novel, one in which both innocence and evil are ultimately unable to triumph over the forces that overwhelm them.

This research has focused on the role of the Holy Spirit in Christian suffering. A broad concept of suffering is excluded in the study. Of particular concern to this research is 'suffering for the sake of Jesus Christ'. Methods employed in the study are: narrative approach, dialogical approach and synthesis.

Pentecostals are often portrayed as emotional people who are driven largely by experience. In Christ-Centered, Menzies argues that this caricature misses the fact that Pentecostals are fundamentally “people of the book.” Although Pentecostals encourage spiritual experience, they do so with a constant eye to Scripture. The Bible, and particularly the book of Acts, fosters and shapes pentecostal experience. Additionally, Pentecostals are defined by their emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. At its heart, the pentecostal movement is not Spirit-centered, but rather Christ-centered. The work of the Spirit, as Pentecostals understand it, centers on exalting and bearing witness to the Lordship of Christ. Menzies develops these themes by examining the origins, biblical foundations, and missional orientation of the modern pentecostal movement. He concludes that, in spite of contradictory messages from some in fundamentalist pews and the pentecostal academy, Pentecostals are and have always been solidly evangelical. Book Trailer for Christ-Centered .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Offers thirteen powerful meditations and sermons that challenge readers to assess anew the meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection and the life of the Spirit in Jesus' followers today.

"This comparative study investigates the epic lineage that can be traced back from Derek Walcott's Omeros and Ezra Pound's Cantos through Dante's Divina Commedia to the epic poems of Virgil and Homer, and identifies and discusses in detail a number of recurrent key topoi. A fresh definition of the concept of genre is worked out and presented, based on readings of Homer. The study reads Pound's and Walcott's poetics in the light of Roman Jakobson's notions of metonymy and metaphor, placing their long poems at the respective opposite ends of their language poles." "Although there has already been an intermittent critical focus on the 'classical' (and 'Dantean') antecedents of Walcott's poetry, the present study is the first to bring together the whole range of epic intertextualities underlying Omeros, and the first to read this Caribbean masterpiece in the context of Pound's achievement." --Book Jacket.