Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World's Greatest Cathedrals

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One way of finding balance and harmony in one’s household is to simplify areas in our lives from material possessions to more abstract ones including commitments and daily activities. The book includes footnotes and an index as well as Appendix 1 Socialism at High Tide 1985 listing 18 countries with Communism, 11 countries with Social Democracy and 41 Third World Socialism countries. Appendix 2 lists 62 Third World Socialist countries with the dates of beginning and ending. Only 12 continue in that ideology. He shows over all that socialism attempts to make everyone equal yet in doing so erases individual freedoms and often uses force which ends badly in every case. because children do not usually watch while an adult is around, they don’t experience the whole language experience wherein they can converse with another person I've always been fascinated by this subject. It's amazing to me how little most Americans know about it, since it is hardly possible to know anything about the history of the world over the last 200 years without knowing something about the theory and history of socialism. This book was written by someone who was born into a family of true believers, but came to the conclusion, with, I believe, a certain degree of reluctance, that he had to leave the fold.

This is an excellent book on socialism. Heaven on Earth is a readable and very detailed history of socialism through recent centuries. Joshua Muravchik was raised in a socialist home and was a “devout” socialist for a time. He recounts the history and life of some of the leaders of the socialist movement and shows the triumphs and failures along the way. There are four chapters on the Beginnings, four chapters on the Triumphs and four chapters on the Collapse of Socialism. At the end of this section is a very interesting chapter on the Kibbutz showing the most humane socialism. The book ends with an excellent Epilogue to bring us up to date. You are the foundation of your child's entire life. The way you handle yourself when his emotions run high can be a bridge for him whereby he discovers the fundamentals: problems exist, they are challenging, and they can be resolved to the benefit of everyone involved.” Ranging from the birth of astronomy and the methods of early scientific research, Fauber reveals the human story that underlies this civilization altering discovery. And, contrary to the competitive nature of research today, collaboration was key to early scientific discovery. Before the rise of university research institutions, deep thinkers only had each other. They created a kind of family, related to each other via intellectual pursuit rather than blood.This book is about Socialism in action, not ideology, though it obviously gets explained while coursing the lives of those nutty fellows, the wealthy founders of this elitist ideology called Socialism. But it's a 100% history book, delving on the lives of the dudes, on what they preached (and this is not a metaphor) and what they lived, what they said to the crowds, and what they said among themselves. What a bunch of scoundrels, oh my. For families that have not yet found their rhythm, this book would be a valuable asset to your library. It has suggestions for daily routines, annual routines, seasonal festivals, birthday celebrations, and other ways families can spend time and make memories together. There are also extremely informative suggestions for how to set up your children's indoor and outdoor play spaces to encourage maximum sensory and texture experiences (natural elements, freedom of movement, encouragement of imagination, etc.), explanations of the stages of child play as they age, descriptions of types of books to read with your children that will foster their natural curiosity and development, suggestions for ways to incorporate art into your child's play, and a focus on how everything you do will become a blueprint for your child's rhythms, behavior, and emotional health. They learn through imitation, after all, so we must be mindful that our children are always learning from us. This was an interesting read about the history of socialism. The author's own personal, family connection lends some interesting insight into the history of Kibuttz settlement in Israel. It also helped me understand the generally pessimistic view that he holds throughout most of the book. Of course that's not to say I don't disagree. In particular, the history of communism seems be a history of hope and f related f to live up too those hopes. As the primary role models of the child, self-care is a must for parents. "Your children need a role model who knows how to find joyful connection with himself and the world.” When you show your enthusiasm in doing activities that you love, such as playing the guitar or going to the museum, it will spill over.

it could affect the stimulus-response pattern of a child because if the child doesn’t understand what’s happening onscreen, he won’t have the opportunity to question why (unless there is an adult present who can process what is happening) The reason being, the central task of a parent is to guide the path in answering the fundamental question, “Who am I?” And a guides, parents are to set firm boundaries and inner rhythms wherein children have freedom within these containments (what is a gentler term for this?). The author also added in her classroom observations about children who are exposed to too much media:In terms of what has been written, the prose is light and readable. The one time it really dragged was due to the subject matter (the incredibly boring history of the American labor movement) rather than the author's style. Today we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500's—of different nationality, age, religion, and class—collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world—and with it, the uneasy conditions of modern life. The home should be set up to encourage imitation of adult activities. That is because adults are considered as templates of children on how it is to be human and whatever the child sees, will be copied. They just don’t imitate our “outer” gestures but also our “inner” ones. That is, how we move with purpose and conviction. For parents, this could be an onerous task because we might feel that we are imperfect human beings but the author assures us that: Aesthetically, this is fantastic. The language sings—the book begs to be read aloud (and I frequently did so, interrupting whatever anyone around me was doing). You can feel the passion, the fervor throughout. A few paragraphs from different chapters illustrate this:

When the common people come to power, the humble worker, the land cultivator, the self-made man and woman, then yo got an American and the American system. Never Socialism. A true American is a man like George Meany. Thankfully, most Americans can recognize themselves in Meany, still at this day and time. This is a huge question, and we can only accomplish the task piece by piece, with love as our guide, our strength and our respite.” It’s a continuous process of refining our inner and outer selves. Better to be consistent than perfect. Notional knowledge may make a man excellent at praising the glorious and worthy acts and virtues of Christ; but that transforming knowledge that accompanies salvation, will cause a man divinely to imitate the glorious acts and virtues of Christ." (179) But these are small criticisms of an otherwise first-rate book; and they are not so damning: for even in these travel sections Kadri's research is prodigious and his descriptions of the abuses of Islamic law, such as in the area of blasphemy in Pakistan, very affecting. At its best, Heaven on Earth is a meditation on how decline – and the attendant loss of self-confidence – can reduce the once grand ideas of a civilisation to petty rigidities.The book – in part a straight history of the sharia, in part a journey probing its application in our present time – opens in 7th-century Arabia. The year is 610 and a 40-year-old Meccan trader is feeling the first throb of revelation. With the exception of Barnaby Rogerson's Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, I have read few books that give as humane and believable a portrait of the Prophet as this. The picture that emerges is of a man balancing the pressures of divine revelation with the political demands of having become, at the end of his life, king and general of Arabia. As faith adjusts to the needs of the moment, the ground is prepared for one of Kadri's big themes: the tension between text and context. The quality of our family culture pivots entirely upon the awareness we bring to it. Let us bring as much consciousness to this process as we can."

One of the kibbutzniks admitted: “People like me who started as socialists concluded that you can work hard and get nothing while others don't work hard. It's so unfair.” And this simple deduction had to take a whole life-span to be learned! Well, doesn't it look like 2 plus 2 to you? “Those who leave [the kibbutz] are often the most economically productive.” Wow, that's some deep, deep, thinking.A debt crisis]. What was so devastating about all the borrowing […] was that little of the money had been used as capital to boost the kibbutzim's earnings. Instead, it had been spent to raise the standard of living. The impulse to do this did not grow out of hedonism, but in the hopes of stemming the loss of members. By some point in the 1970s the majority of kibbutz-raised children were leaving. The children of the founders, being raised in this irrational pseudo-religion, were expected to be “the best kibbutzniks”. It failed. It just goes against human nature. Decent humans want to be free. Amazing that Christians in the West should be looked down on by this crazy and dangerous God-haters as unscientific and irrational; well look at them! Through my research on child development (I'm a high school teacher, but a first-time mom) I have become extremely interested in Waldorf education. I'd never even heard of it until I started reading books like Simplicity Parenting and You Are Your Child's First Teacher. I guess it's not as nationally popular as the better-known Montessori education. And while Heaven on Earth does not explicitly say it is a Waldorf-inspired book, it is; and it is wonderful!