Who Do You Say I Am

"WHAT ARE THEY saying about me? What do you think about me?" Everybody has asked these questions but when Jesus of Nazareth posed them to his friends at Caesarea-Philippi, an ancient Roman cosmopolitan city on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, he started a discussion that continues to baffle, enrage and inspire people two millennia later. I have always wondered if these were real or trick questions. Was Jesus cornering Peter into giving the right dogmatic answer, later to be included in sacred writings, or was this an open question addressed to all people? I don't want

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Desert Words to Live By

THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.

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What Genre of Best Describes the Frankenstein Tale?

GOTHIC: TALES OF macabre, fantastic, and supernatural, usually set amid haunted castles, graveyards, ruins and wild picturesque landscapes. They reached the height of their considerable fashion in the 1790's and the early years of the 19th century (Oxford Companion to English , p. 405-06). Undoubtedly, there are Gothic elements to Mary Shelley's novel. She was familiar with the classics of Gothicism: Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), M.G. Lewis's The Monk (1796) and William Beckford'sVathek (1786). In common with these Gothic tales, Frankenstein made use of the correspondence between theme, character and setting. One of the chief elements in

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