FREE/BARGAIN — Christian Interest

[Difflugia]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The nice thing about the wiki is that you can add things to it yourself. There is no reason it cannot be the best source out there for everything eBook related. It just needs more people to know about it and those who are willing to update the data.

Dale

Is there a style guide or anything for the wiki? I'd be willing to try to update some of the information, but I don't want to step on any toes. Looking at the update history, I see that those toes are exclusively yours. If there is a set of guidelines that you expect of yourself, I'd like to know what it is.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Is there a style guide or anything for the wiki? I'd be willing to try to update some of the information, but I don't want to step on any toes. Looking at the update history, I see that those toes are exclusively yours. If there is a set of guidelines that you expect of yourself, I'd like to know what it is.

I didn't notice that those were your toes, DaleDe. Thanks for your work on the wiki!

[GtrsRGr8]

Receive, free, an ebook, True Devotion to Mary: With Preparation for Total Consecration, from Catholic Way Publishing.

Whether you are an adherent of Roman Catholicism, some other religion, or none at all, you may find this book to be interesting, if not educational.

Here are some characteristics of this particular edition from Catholic Way Publishing:
— The Original and Best 1863 Translation from the French by Reverend Frederick William Faber, D.D.
— Two Books in One, True Devotion to Mary and 33-Day Preparation for Total Consecration
— Includes Prefaces, an Introduction, information on True Devotion and Saint Louis De Montfort
— A Classic Masterpiece of Marian Theology
— Prayers are included in each of the 33 Day Preparation Days
— Over 68,000 words including illustrations by Bartolome Esteban Murillo
— Includes an Active Index and Table of Contents
— Includes Active Links to Prayers and Endnotes

Frankly, the Kindle version is only 99 cents, but there may be a (some) greater advantage(s) to having this particular, edition. One advantage that I can think of immediately is that Amazon's ebook is available only in the mobi format, where CWP's is available in this and all other of other favorite flavors, also (i.e., PDF and ePub)--you can download one, two, or even all three formats, if you so desire.

Here are the CWP linkies to all three formats:
mobi.
ePub.
PDF.

[GtrsRGr8]

I'm an audiophile.

But one disadvantage of listening to a non-fiction audiobook, without having a print copy (paper-based or digital), too, is that you "never" get the footnotes/endnotes, and other ancillary stuff that the print-based book might contain.

There are exceptions to that rule. One that immediately comes to mind is The Great Courses courses, which generally, at least, include a PDF with each course, with the PDF including such things as transcripts, footnotes/endnotes, and outlines.

The audiobook version of Ken Ham's The Lie (which refutes the theory of biological evolution), published by Master Books, is another exception. This may not be widely known, but they provide a separate digital pamphlet, free, with footnotes/endnotes for the audiobook comprising most of the 27 pages of the pamphlet. There also are some additional goodies at the end.

The link.

[HarryT]

Why on Earth would you recommend that anyone waste their time listening to such complete garbage?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Is there a style guide or anything for the wiki? I'd be willing to try to update some of the information, but I don't want to step on any toes. Looking at the update history, I see that those toes are exclusively yours. If there is a set of guidelines that you expect of yourself, I'd like to know what it is.

You can hit help in the wiki and help has a category which can be used to explore these topics. Use current pages to get an idea of organization. You can add pages for new topics such as a new product but adding to an existing page is usually the best if there is a connection . We already have more than 1500 pages. The are some templates as well shown at the bottom of the community portal.

I am the moderator and will assist as needed. I am currently sitting on a cruise ship so my responses may be a bit spotty.

Dale

[Freehunter]

Institutes of the Christian Religion
John Calvin
https://www.monergism.com/institutes-christian-religion

A New Translation, by Henry Beveridge, Esq
Edinburgh: Printed for The Calvin Translation Society, 1845

Free

ePub http://www.monergism.com/thethreshol...%20Calvin.epub

.mobi http://www.monergism.com/thethreshol...%20Calvin.mobi

.pdf http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.pdf

[TrevorViking]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Why on Earth would you recommend that anyone waste their time listening to such complete garbage?

I was going to say something a little less harsh, but thought I’d get in trouble from a mod.

Fwiw, I’m a very conservative Christian, but feel that the young earth creationism stuff is bunk. Teaching it to children, like Ken Ham encourages at his Noah’s Ark Museum, is borderline child abuse.

[Difflugia]

In case anyone didn't know, there is a Politics and Religion subforum that is opt-in where we are allowed to discuss the substance of creationism or other sensitive topics. In your User Control Panel, under Networking, click on Group Memberships. Add yourself to "Hardened Debaters".

This thread ensued after I posted a creationist book six years ago and was moved to P&R. I'm not suggesting that anyone necro that thread, but it contains reasons why some might want to read creationist stuff. If anyone wants to start a new thread, I'd be happy to talk about it again.

I enjoy reading books by creationist apologists and hope they keep getting posted. In fact, the posted link included a "Ken Ham timeline" that isn't in my copy of The Lie and that I found interesting.

If it makes anyone feel better, my daughter doesn't read my creationist books.

[Difflugia]

I almost forgot why I actually visited the forum.

The Jehovah's Witness Watchtower Library CD is now officially online at jw.org.

LINK

The ~3GB download is a DVD image that can either be mounted in recent versions of Windows or burned to a physical DVD. 7-Zip will open it on older versions of Windows.

This software contains a nearly full set of Watchtower publications including the NWT Bible, Watchtower and Awake magazines back to 1950 and all published books (including Reasoning from the Scriptures). Previously, the disc was only legally available from a Witness (and Witnesses weren't supposed to give them out to non-Witnesses) or eBay.

For any fellow Linux nerds, it runs in current versions of Wine.

[Difflugia]

I went looking for free books and found a rather random assortment.

A Year of Living Prayerfully by Jared Brock
B&N
Amazon
Kobo

This first ebook is a mainstream Christian response to A. J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically, which was a tongue-in-cheek look at trying to follow all of the instructions in the Bible that started the ongoing trend in "Year of Living..." books. It looks to be self-published ("Steward Publishing" only seems to publish this ebook), but the original was published by Tyndale.

Saints volume 1: The Standard of Truth by the LDS Church
B&N
Amazon

The LDS Church is in the process of publishing a four-volume history of the Church called Saints. This first volume was published in September 2018. The book is free right now, but I can't tell if it's temporary (some sites list a non-zero "retail price"). The second volume can be read online, but doesn't look to be otherwise available.

Another Mormon find is the first six volumes in an in-progress New Testament translation from Brigham Young University. According to the introductions:

Each volume in this series contains a new working translation of the New Testament. Calling this a new “rendition” clarifies that it does not seek to replace the authorized KJV adopted by the LDS Church as its official English text. Rather, it aims to enhance readers’ understanding conceptually and spiritually by rendering the Greek texts into modern English with LDS sensitivities in mind. Comparing and explaining the New Rendition in light of the KJV then serves as one important purpose for each volume’s notes, comments, analyses, and summaries. This effort responds in modest ways to the desire President J. Reuben Clark Jr. expressed in his diary in 1956 that someday “qualified scholars [would provide] ... a translation of the New Testament that will give us an accurate translation that shall be pregnant with the great principles of the Restored Gospel.”

There's no actual commentary or justification for particular translation choices. Each volume is just a new translation of one of the books.

The Gospel according to Mark: A New Rendition by Julie M. Smith
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Testimony of Luke: A New Rendition by Eric D. Huntsman and S. Kent Brown
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: A New Rendition by Michael D. Rhodes and Richard D. Draper
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Epistle to the Ephesians: A New Rendition by Phillip Abbot
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Epistle to the Hebrews: A New Rendition by Michael D. Rhodes, Richard D. Draper
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

The Revelation of John the Apostle: A New Rendition by Michael D. Rhodes and Richard D. Draper
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

I found three Open Access academic books that look interesting.

Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours by Sharon Farmer
Kobo
B&N
Amazon

I also found a PDF on a hosting server. It's a scan with OCR that looks like it was done by the publisher, but the CC license means it's a legal download in any case.

Sharon Farmer here investigates the ways in which three medieval communities—the town of Tours, the basilica of Saint-Martin there, and the abbey of Marmoutier nearby—all defined themselves through the cult of Saint Martin. She demonstrates how in the early Middle Ages the bishops of Tours used the cult of Martin, their fourthcentury predecessor, to shape an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town. As the heirs to Martin's see, the bishops projected themselves as the rightful leaders of the community. However, in the late eleventh century, she shows, the canons of Saint-Martin (where the saint's relics resided) and the monks of Marmoutier (which Martin had founded) took control of the cult and produced new legends and rituals to strengthen their corporate interests.

Since the basilica and the abbey differed in their spiritualities, structures, and external ties, the canons and monks elaborated and manipulated Martin's cult in quite different ways. Farmer shows how one saint's cult lent itself to these varying uses, and analyzes the strikingly dissimilar Martins that emerged. Her skillful inquiry into the relationship between group identity and cultural expression illuminates the degree to which culture is contested territory.

Farmer's rich blend of social history and hagiography will appeal to a wide range of medievalists, cultural anthropologists, religious historians, and urban historians.

Pentecostalism and Witchcraft: Spiritual Warfare in Africa and Melanesia edited by Knut Rio, Michelle MacCarthy and Ruy Blanes
Springer Link (DRM-free epub and PDF)
Amazon

This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia—where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

Juxtaposes case studies from Melanesia and Africa in order to better compare, contrast, and illuminate the effects of and engagements with PentecostalismFocuses on chief themes of Pentecostalism and witchcraft while also bringing in discussions of globalization, visibility, movements of capital, and embodiment

Presents rich and detailed case studies while also offering up wide-ranging theoretical analyses and critiques of established thinking/concepts

The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community by Tom Boylston
Luminos Open Access (DRM-free epub, PDF, mobi)
Kobo
Amazon

The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.

[GtrsRGr8]

^ A huge amount of karma coming to you for those two posts!

[Freehunter]

The Gospel According to Jesus: What Is Authentic Faith? Kindle Edition
by John F. MacArthur

limited time reduction

US $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Accord...dp/B0016H97GO/

UK £1.99
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gospel-Acco...dp/B0016H97GO/

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by Freehunter

The Gospel According to Jesus: What Is Authentic Faith? Kindle Edition
by John F. MacArthur

limited time reduction

US $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Accord...dp/B0016H97GO/

UK £1.99
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gospel-Acco...dp/B0016H97GO/

This is a "revised" and "expanded" edition. Even if you have the original edition (as I do--in dead-tree form. Arrrghh!), you still might want to get this new edition.

Thanks for the post.

[GtrsRGr8]

Eerdmans has a book sale each month. July's is now in effect; it's a great one.

There is a large selection. As usual, the prices in this sale are what I consider fantastic, especially given the kind of books that they sell ("deep," tending toward the academic; no pop-Christian), and the fact that the retail prices are usually what I consider high, but the sale selection books are super-low in price.

There are a couple of ways, that I'm familiar with, to access information about the books, and place your order at the same time. One is to go directly to Eerdword, the Erdmans blog. IMPORTANT: groups of sale books (thumbnails of them) are scattered throughout the webpage. To get to the first group, drill down until you see a group of ebooks giving prices and links to Amazon, underneath the books. When you're through viewing those, scroll down until you find some more like that, and so on.

The other way is to go to gospelebooks.net. They list all of the books in a sale in one place; the place where they are currently listed is at the top of the third page, but when new, additional books are added, the Eerdmans books section will get "pushed down." It's annoying to scroll down, sometimes several pages, to find a selection that you're interested in, but when I have my druthers, I go to that website.