This is a book which I read for the first time in 2022, just after it was published, and which I read again in 2024; and this time, too, it was for me the most fascinating read of the year. Phenomena called "eucharistic miracles," related to Christianity’s central mystery, the Eucharist (“the source and summit of the Christian life,” The Catechism of the Catholic Church), have been reported throughout the centuries - for example, they are discussed in the monumental 13th-century work Summa Theologiae authored by St. Thomas Aquinas. In modern times, however, they were usually dismissed by educated people, along with reports of weeping or bleeding statues, as so much popular superstition. As cardiologist Dr. Serafini shows, however, five cases of seemingly miraculous events related to the Eucharist have now undergone rigorous scientific analysis in university laboratories, with astonishing results. The book walks the reader through extensive medical and scientific research into these five events, confronting us with startling testimonies by hematologists, oncologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and others, who all concluded that what they discovered in these events was inexplicable by science (as they know it). The author does not see these discoveries as proofs for Christian belief but rather, as signs addressed to believers whose faith may be faltering, and as mysterious evidence of God's love for people and his desire to be in union with them through the mystery of the Eucharist.
To scientifically-minded readers, Christians and non-Christians, believers and non-believers, this is a gripping, as well as, challenging book. I loved it.
The Gospels might not be “good enough” for modernity, and science is certainly its god. But neither is an impediment to the one, true God. Indeed, He is using methods of the twenty-first century — His twenty-first century — to show how our Faith can be proven through Eucharistic miracles with clinical scientific precision.
In this astounding book, prominent cardiologist and author Dr. Franco Serafini walks us through the extensive medical and scientific research into five Eucharistic miracles, unveiling the stunning testimonies of hematologists, oncologists, neurologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and more who all concluded the same thing: the five Eucharistic…
This book places semantics, that is, the study of meaning, at the very core of linguistics, and it understands semantics not as the “semantics of languages” but as the “semantics of words and people.”
The people whose words this book particularly seeks to understand live in the South Pacific town of Vila in Vanuatu; the book is dedicated to them. The author shows that in order to understand the cultural and conceptual world reflected in the meanings that the people of Vila live with and draw on in their everyday discourse, these meanings need to be described through words that have equivalents in the speaker's own language, Bislama, rather than, as it is usually done, through words of “Anglo English.”
What Levisen attempts to achieve in this ground-breaking book is best expressed in the quote from a great linguist of the previous century, Benjamin Lee Whorf: “to light thick darkness of the language, and thereby much of the thought, the culture and the outlook of a given community” (1956:73). The book is a passionate critique of the current role of Anglo English not as a de facto global language but as a “global metalanguage” for describing other people’s meanings and ideas. The book shows how distortion of other people’s conceptual worlds can be avoided, and how the Anglocentrism prevalent in today’s humanities and social sciences can be overcome through the use of a standardised, translatable Minimal English instead of a full-blown, non-standardised and non-translatable, Anglo English. In the author’s own words, “Through original semantic work on urban Pacific words and meanings, this framework takes a critical cultural semantic look at key themes in the field of languages, communication, sociology, psychology, and geopolitics.”
As a linguist and a semanticist who has devoted my life’s work to a search for human understanding, I find this book extraordinarily heartening and moving.
Global knowledge production increasingly happens through one particular language: modern Anglo English. What does the Anglocentric reliance of English words and phrases mean for the way we make claims, formulate research questions, and develop theories? In this monograph, these questions are scrutinized and explored through "Postcolonial Semantics", a new framework that draws on advances in postcolonial linguistics and cognitive/cultural semantics. Through original semantic work on Bislama words and Urban Pacific concepts, each chapter provides alternatives to Anglocentric linguistic framings of knowledge in the domains of language, communication, sociology, psychology, and geopolitics. Highlighting the pluriversality of meaning-making and the multipolarity of…
One of the blurbs on this book’s cover calls it “a masterpiece of scholarship and storytelling,” and this is what I think too. How can a work of such terrific learning and filled with such moral passion be so immensely readable and often so very funny?
Holland has an unfailing eye for fascinating historical details and for enthralling historical characters and historical debate. The book is provocative in its critique of modern Western secularism, in the fun it makes of “woke,” and its insistence on the foundational power of the biblical story that God created humans – all humans – in his own image.
This book made me laugh, cry, grind my teeth, and, above all, think. I have given it as a present to several friends. I have also read several chapters of it with my teenage granddaughters; and it was extremely gratifying to see how this book made them think and want to argue, and how interesting they found it, too.
The Sunday Times bestseller, with a new introduction by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times History Book of the Year 'Terrific: bold, ambitious and passionate' Peter Frankopan
Dominion tells the epic story of how those in the West came to be what they are, and why they think the way they do. Ranging from Moses to Merkel, from Babylon to Beverley Hills, from the emergence of secularism to the abolition of slavery, it explores why, in…
My book explains Christian faith, as distilled in the Nicene Creed of 325 and 381 A.D., through Minimal English, which is the English version of a slightly expanded form of “Basic Human.” The Story of God and People told in Minimal English shows the power and versatility of simple words, which, evidence suggests, all languages share.
As the book shows, with the help of such “universal human words”, supplemented by a small inventory of words important to a particular culture, a very rich and sophisticated set of ideas can be explained in a way intelligible to anyone, regardless of their background and beliefs. There are well over two billion Christians in the world, about one-third of the world’s total population. This book explains, in simple and clear words, what they believe, and it shows why the story that they believe in is often described as “the greatest story ever told.”
