Ed Delph’s “The 5 Minute Miracle” is filled with real life stories which demonstrate authentic, genuine Christianity and validate the power of God’s Word in everyday life experiences.
The stories in this book are a compiled from articles taken from “The Church-Community Connection” Ed’s newspaper columns published earlier in the Glendale Star and the Peoria Times. Each of the chapters is from one of Ed’s columns and includes a story with an application the reader can apply in their own personal spiritual journey.
There are inspirational stories on meeting adversity. They reflect wisdom for helping the reader work through times of crisis. Many provide practical reminders: such as the difference between urgent and vital, or vignettes featuring real people who have demonstrated authentic Christianity in meeting their adversity.
Ed is a gifted writer and story teller. His writing is filled with wit and humor. He provides a comedic relief, entertainment, inspiration, encouragement, and motivation in each article. His stories are dynamic and life transforming. His subtle humor kept me smiling, grinning, and chuckling.
As I completed each chapter I stopped to reflect on the new insights, spiritual nuggets, and the life changing challenges opening up to me. A succinct phrase or meaningful verse from the Bible round out the day’s reading. Each short chapter is relevant and engaging, providing spiritual insights, and applications for everyday life.
“The 5 Minute Miracle: Standing Out by Becoming Outstanding” has awakened a thirst for my more of Ed Delph.
Destiny Image Publishers, Inc., 978-0768427653,
As Reviewed for Midwest Book Review
Richard R. Blake, Christian Education Consultant, Book Store Owner
From the title, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this novel when I asked for a review copy. Now, having read it, I have to say I’m impressed beyond my expectations.
Primarily, Hungry Woman in Paris is the story of a young woman trying to find herself in a foreign country. Yet it is so much more than that. Beyond a delicious facade of Parisian gourmet cuisine and love escapades, the novel examines important issues like prejudice against minorities and gender roles.
Escaping a broken engagement and the death of her cousin and best friend, twenty-nine year old Canela flies to Paris and decides to attend Le Croq Rouge, a presumably famous cooking school popular among foreigners. There, the former journalist immerses herself in the sensual world of smell, touch and taste in order to keep away from suicidal thoughts. She works very hard and not only struggles with learning to cook, but also with learning French and dealing with French Officials, a situation that brings her back in time when she was an undocumented Mexican in the US. Now that she’s in France, she has to go through the same prejudice all over again.
The cooking course lasts nine months and is divided in three parts: Basic, Intermediate and Superior. During this time, Canela becomes involved in various relationships, but although she initially is attached emotionally to one man, hers is primarily a sexual journey of self discovery in a man-dominated world where ‘free’ women are considered whores. Yet, Canela stays true to herself and her willingness to become free of gender restrictions. A feminist and activist at heart, she also becomes involved in various difficult situations which bring forth her passion for what she believes is right. At the same time, she is tormented by the spirit–or so it seems–of her dead cousin and by intense feelings of guilt. All through the novel, her inner loneliness and desperation permeates the story. Eventually, she must choose between staying true to herself and be alone or become what society expects of her and find what is socially accepted as ‘happiness’.
Hungry Woman in Paris is a compelling, engrossing read. Told in the first person from the point of view of Canela, the story sparkles with genuinity and our protagonist’s strong voice. Canela comes across as passionate and forceful yet sad, very vulnerable woman trying to find her true identity in a world that denies her just that. The prose flows beautifully, shining here and there with Canela’s witty remarks and her honest view of life’s struggles. The secondary characters are also compelling but the novel is driven by Canela and her narrative voice. The pace moves fairly quickly and the food descriptions are a fun, delicious part of the novel that work on two levels–indeed, the word ‘hungry’ is meant both for food and lust. Lopez interlaces the two elements with clarity and deftness, pulling the reader into a world of drunken sensuality. Highly recommended.
Mayra Calvani is the National Latino Books Examiner for Examiner.com. Visit her at http://www.examiner.com/x-6309-Latino-Books-Examiner
One of the greatest challenges in your long term relationship is attempting to keep things fun and exciting in the bedroom.
However, work or your kids or a myriad of other tasks and chores that need to be done often interfere with the time you need to stoke the flames of passion in your sex life. If you are like me you know how busy life can be so it only makes sense to find new ideas that can be used over and again in your list of love making techniques.
Into this situation comes “100 Sex Games for Couples”. This is nothing outrageously kinky as sex games are a great way to keep your lovemaking fresh and original and may also have a longer reuse value than the variety of sex positions and lovemaking techniques.
Does this e-book by Michael Webb actually deliver on this promise though with enough good sex games to keep things interesting?
The book starts well with an introduction about how intimacy is spiritual, emotional & physical covering more aspects than some guides that gloss over straight to the physical aspect. This sets the tone for the entire book as the games are about ‘making love’ and not just a physical act of sexual intercourse.
The actual games that follow are divided into two sections which confused me for a second because there were only 33 games not a hundred until I saw that each game had multiple variations taking the total to 100. These variations have different rules and variation on the original concept which I thought was interesting because you could use the same game with a twist just when your partner might have been getting used to the original to keep them on their toes! Some of the games are more entertaining than others like any comprehensive list but they all had merit and some were very imaginative and very sexy.
For example there is an exciting guessing game, a passionate night of lovemaking but starting from an unusual location, an pleasurable storytelling game which I quite liked and even a card game with a twist (no, not just strip poker). They range from games involving food to communicating, touching and sharing intimate moments.
All in all, the book is well worth the asking price, considering it could be the very thing that brings you closer together as a couple!
So, is this book worth it? For the small amount it costs and the amazing variety of ideas that will give you many nights of pleasure and togetherness it is a great bit of extra reading that can liven up your sex life for years.
I recommend this guide to anyone looking for something new if things have gone a bit stale or even to those who are having good sex but want it to be great!
Until Galileo and the Renaissance, man was firmly at the center of his universe, as defined and illustrated by scientists and philosophers alike. This belief was perhaps best shownin the geocentric model of the solar system, started by the Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, nearly two thousand years ago, to which many others contributed before it became the officially accepted version, blessed by the Church, in Galileo’s time. This model placeda fixedEarth at the center not just of the solar system but of the entire known universe, including the “sphere” of the fixed stars, with everything else in the heavens rotating around it, just as it appearsto anyone looking at the night sky.
This model meant that man, together with the Earth itself, occupied the most important position in the whole of the divine creation. Then came Galileo, who championed the Copernican model of the solar system, in which the center was occupied by the sun, not the earth. Man was not yet very far from the center, on the third “sphere” from the central sun, but nevertheless his importance in the scheme of things was greatly diminished.
The sciences of the new age, which started in the seventeenth century, then conspired to reduce man to ever greater insignificance. The only subjects of the new physics that Galileo recognized as fit for scientific inquiry were matter and motion, precisely for the reason that (in his opinion) man was notneeded for their existence in nature. They were independent of man. Then it became obvious that man was not nearly as old as the world.Far from being created only a few “days” after the rest of the world, he actually came into the picture at a very late stage of the earth’s development. The rest of nature had an independent history of its own,several billions of years older than the earliest appearance of man. Even more denigrating was the picture of man that emerged from this scientific study of his origins. Far from being created “in the image of God” he was, it turned out, nothing more than a slightly advanced ape. All science concentrated on finding similarities between him and this ancestral ape, rather than fundamental differences.
Later still came many theories questioning the uniqueness of our solar system, our galaxy or indeed the universe we can perceive. Mathematically, there were many other universes as possibilties. A recent article on string theory had this to say about man’s position in our world:
“The infinite number of solutions to string theory points to the most mind-blowing possibility of all: that the universe itself is not unique, but is just one example of a possibly infinite number of “universes”. It would be the ultimate downgrading of mankind. Far from being center-staged, as the first astronomers believed, humanity has already been shuffled gradually out of the limelight by each new consmological insight. An infinite number of universes would reduce it to utter cosmic insignificance.”
So here we have an apparently inexorable series of diminishments of man, from a giant of significance at the center of the entire creation, to someone who could barely be found with an electronmicroscope in a corner of a minor sun system, located in a rather dull and unspectacular galaxy among billions of others, in one ofan infinite number of possible universes. Mankind, as an interesting species, seemed about played out.
The implications of quantum theory dropped into this dispiriting scene, completely reversing its trend. It seemed that reports of the death of the significance of humanity had been greatly exaggerated. Quantum theory is not new: it started at the very beginning of the twentieth century, so its development was parallel to that of other branches of physics. It seems, however, that nobody cross-checked the data about the importance of man in different parts of physics. The very puzzling and indeed absurd sounding consequences of quantum mechanics can be found fully detailed in the literature on that subject, so only the bare results will be mentioned here. One of these consequences states that observation not only marks the objective observed, but actually brings it into existence. Before the observation, there was no physical objective. (Quantum experiments are usually conducted on subatomic particles, but the implications are general, both in theory and in view of the fact that largephysical objects consist entirely of these small particles). As a leading quantum cosmologist put it: “No microscopic property is a property until it is an observed property”. And who does this vital observing? None other than man himself, this otherwise despised and practically eliminated entity!
Of course, mere observation is not enough. A camera or a photographic plate also might be said tomake a record of an event. What is needed in addition is the human consciousness, and this is fully recognized in quantum mechanics. A popular book on the weirdness of quantum mechanics puts it like this:
“Quantum theory insists that our reasonable, everyday worldview [that objects are independently real] is fundamentally wrong. Different interpretations of what the theory tells us offer different worldviews. But every one of them involves the mysterious encounter of consciousness with the physical world……The encounter with consciousness arises directly in the quantum-theory-neutralexperimental demonstration. No mere interpretation of the theory can avoid the encounter.”
In the quantum mechanical universe, there is a disquieting speculation that man is not only important in the scheme of things but that he is apparently involved in the very appearance of the phenomena of the natural world. This is not only an abrupt reversal of his diminishing importance since medieval times, it actually raises his importance far above that of merely placing him in the center of the universe. When he occupied that central position, man was still very firmly a created being only and not involved in any way with the creation itself. In fact, above man and reaching far into the heavens, were the “spheres” of the planets and the stars, each one under the guidance (and motive power) of one of the angelic hierarchies, from the lowest (or ordinary) angels, who guided the moon, to the mightiest of all, the seraphim, in charge of the “primum mobile”, the region beyond the fixed stars. All these majestic hierarchies that stretched beyond lowly mankind and up to the divinity, were all still created beings. Now quantum mechanics is not simply reversing man’s insignificance,but raising him up to levels never before dreamed of. What is to be made of all these cross-currents? Wheredoes mankind really fit into the overall picture of creation?
Perhaps a review of ourideas of man’s origin might be useful. At present, the conventional view is that matter is the primary substancefrom which everything else, such as life or consciousness, evolved. Both modern physics in generaland quantum mechanics have come to the conclusion that matter, as perceived through the senses, is not independently real. It is no more than a subjective appearance so that the creation of life and man did not occur as a natural process on this earth, based on the increasing complexity of the protein molecule. If, as Heisenberg says, “the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of things or facts”, then the origin of matter must be looked for elsewhere. And if this is true for the origin of matter, it must also be true for the origin of life and man, because these do not exist on earth without matter.
This whole argument from quantum mechanics presents a serious challenge to presently accepted thinking about the early ages of this earth, before the appearance of man. According to this latest thinking, there is an inherentlyclose connection between man and nature. As one exponent put it: “Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists “out there” independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a ‘participatory universe’.”
The extreme weirdness of quantum mechanics and the newly unsatisfactory status of man can be resolved only by a comprehensive review of reality in physics today, as the above quotation indicates. For most of us today, if we think casually, the independent existence of nature”out there” is still objectively real; it does not depend on the presence of human beings and their senses. Although this is what we feel in everyday life, physics no longer supports this view. “Participation”, on the other hand, implies subjectivity, that is the presence of man and his senses. If objective reality can no longer be applied to events and phenomena of the physical world, it might well be a property of a world of origins, by definition beyond the reach of our senses, but nevertheless real. Such an expansion of the framework within which physics operates might well be the essential step towards solving the various difficulties and inconsistencies mentioned in this article.
Werner Thurau was born in December 1927, in Havana, Cuba. In 1929, his family returned to his father’s native Germany. He spent the entire 1930s in Berlin, but came to England in 1939 and was then further educated in that country, ending with an engineering degree from London University. His further career took him all over the world on technical projects, moving first to Mexico and then to the United States, where he lives now. At school in England, he was exposed early in life to the world of ideas. Some of his teachers were friends of C.S. Lewis and Lewis’s Oxford group, the Inklings, and his father was a philosophical bookworm. Werner combined this background with a lifelong interest in physics, especially modern physics after it breached the atomic barrier. This interest extended to Galileo, the founder of our age, and what made him so different from others of his time, as well as to the effect physics has had on other related sciences, such as evolutionary theory (and its polar opposite, creationism). He came to see that the latest developments in physics bring in subjects not normally associated with a book on that science, such as consciousness, reality concepts and even ethics, involving an ever-changing role for man and his importance in the scheme of things. For more on these important questions, visit http://www.galileoshadow.com
In The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing author Emanuel Rosen takes a look at buzz from a new perspective. He figures that by now, we already know what buzz is, and he’s right. For the most part we do. We get buzz, but Mr. Rosen uses this new edition to address the parts of buzz we may not yet get: How to do it and Why it is so important.
Mr. Rosen continues the tale of buzz that he began in original The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing (read my review of that book here). So in essence, this is not a revised book – but practically a whole new book, written from a new perspective. I mean with 12 new chapters – I’d call that a new book. That said, you can’t discount the first book at all. You really need them both to understand buzz in its totality.
The best thing about this new edition is the stories – examples and anecdotes of companies who got buzz right. Mr. Rosen cites NOLS outdoor school, Tom’s Shoes, the book Cold Mountain, video game Halo 3, and other products and companies you’ve heard about and may not have even realized the buzz architecture behind them all.
Architecture – yes, successful buzz takes planning. When I first heard the term buzz, I thought it was something that generated itself. And there is some buzz that pops up, but that sort of buzz usually doesn’t last. Well planned and executed buzz is what creates real excitement – if done right, as many stories in this book show.
Mr. Rosen shows us the importance of measuring buzz and how its being done. He describes how on-line buzz and off-line buzz are like love and marriage – you can’t have one without the other. Well, you can, but the result is less impressive to say the least. The key to effective buzz is that it transcends both worlds and manifests on the lips as easily as on the keyboard. He talks about negative and positive buzz, experience based and second-hand buzz.
I think my favorite chapter was number 7 – Why We Talk. Its fascinating to explore why buzz exists, why people have a need to spread the word – from barbers in New Jersey to Bedouins in Sinai.
The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing is chock full of good stuff about buzz. And its told in such a masterful way as to be entertaining, enlightening and intelligent. If you have any interest at all in this new world of marketing, you’ll get a hold of The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing as well as The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing.
Joyce Dierschke is a marketing communications copywriter specializing in emerging, broadcast, and print media. Marketing’s ever-changing landscape demands an agile copywriter. Cross-platform exposure and expanding campaigns require a communicator with a variety of skills. If you’re looking for someone to write compelling copy for your next initiative, call Joyce! For more information or to contact Joyce, visit: http://www.JoyceDierschkeCopywriting.com.
To purchase Emanuel Rosen’s book, click here: The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited.
Well, technically they’re on the windowsill next to my bed… but regardless, this post is about the newest books in my personal library.
First, the book, “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, is an exciting and almost unbelievable (but true) account of one man’s pledge to build a school in a small Baltistan village. After failing to reach the summit of K2 in Pakistan, Greg Mortenson spent a heart breaking descent wracked with guilt over coming so close to the top, only to leave unfulfilled. His dream was to leave his little sister’s necklace at the top of the mountain as a tribute to her life’s struggles and accomplishments. On the way back to civilization, he spent some time in the village of Korphe, where he was met with unmatched hospitality from a community of generous, caring people living in the depths of poverty.
I’m about half way in and I can’t wait to keep reading! It’s definitely a page-turner an I certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a fulfilling, incredible non-fiction story.
The other book I’ve started in entitled, “Equal: Women Reshape American Law,” by Fred Strebeigh. I’m about 50 pages in and already the amount of research that’s been compiled into this book is outstanding. I’m also happy to announce that the Women’s Law Association is scheduled to host Professor Strebeigh at our annual conference in March!
Next up will be:
“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Hugh Macleod is a good read, both online and in print. His new book is called Ignore Everybody, and it’s premised on the keys to being creative.
Hugh’s story reads a lot like a web 2.0 fairytale. He started writing cartoons on the back of business cards a long time ago. All of a sudden, today, he’s a huge blogger and has a lot of followers. And by “all of a sudden” I mean that it took about ten years. Anyway, he has an eclectic array of vocational pieces in his tool belt. He now is an author of a big seller, he does more “traditional” art and sells it online, he does marketing consulting, he’s worked for Microsoft as such, he’s still working on a Stormhoek wine project, etc. My guess is he has a lot more of “etc.” (in fact, using “etc.” erroneously is a large writing idiosyncrasy of his I’ve picked up on.)
Anyhoo, the reason I bought and read his book (used on Amazon for $7) is because I like his blog. I like his voice and his loosely structured, sporadic writing. It translates well to his book.
Creativity is a really volatile and misunderstood thing. By misunderstood, I mean that no one truly understands it, not that there is a good explanation people just aren’t yet clued into. Everybody ticks differently and so what makes me creative and you creative aren’t necessarily one and the same. But creativity is very important. It’s why Redmarketer exists. I still get a lot of shit about branding a website and creating a logo from people. Yet, it’s a creative outlet. An outlet for me to vent thoughts and ideas and anything I’m digging at that particular point in time. This site was built because of inspiration from people like Hugh that understand the value in slowly building something over the long haul. And, yes, marketing yourself.
Back to the book. Hugh points out, candidly, some very refreshing points on creativity, life in the advertising business as well as life in the cube. With a bunch of funny cartoons intermingled. One such point (and probably the most important) is that a good idea is going to be rejected by almost everyone. Your ideas, good and bad (but especially good) have the potential to really change things in a social construct; i.e. your boss, peers and friends. They may well not like your idea, but they also are likely to subconsciously avoid the potential change your idea represents. It’s not that they want to, it’s just human nature.
You could read this book in less than two hours. It’s EXTREMELY light, but it’s also very enjoyable and would be a good refresher from your typical business fare. Recommended.
