Ifs, Ands, Buts Children's Sermons

Ifs, Ands, Buts Children's Sermons
Author: Mary Grace Becker
Publisher: David C Cook
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2005-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780781442060

Focusing on the big difference made by the "little" words in Scripture, this creative resource allows pastors the flexibility to coordinate messages for children and adults by pulling lessons from many different books of the Bible.

Again. Again and Again.

Again. Again and Again.
Author: Mathias B. Freese
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1627879412

Having once been a psychotherapist who's never hesitated to turn the therapeutical gun barrel toward himself, Mathias B. Freese ramps up his radical reflexivity in this latest work, from confessional first-person narration to third-person "stories" starring "characters" named Matt. (This genre could be called meta-Matt.) "I write to know perhaps something about who I am," Freese writes. "I write to arrive at some awareness, however dim, about self or other, for when I have that fleeting moment of awareness, I feel at one -- true." Truly, Again. Again and Again. is a song of himself. Rocker Billy Idol proves to be an unlikely but apt echoer here: "When there's nothing to lose and there's nothing to prove, well, I'm dancing with myself." As a one-man show, Freese puts the "dance" in "abundance," stressing an author's singularity, the innerness of writing, the sharing -- rather than the proselytizing -- purpose of artistic expression. In other words, as Freese says, "a book is one person's awareness as he or she sees it." More than a few times, Freese had implied that Again. Again and Again. would probably be his swan song, his "final stirrings," his ultimate testament. How laughable, considering both his prolificacy and "urge and urge and urge" (as Whitman would gush). Sure enough, the author is no longer so sure that he's expressed enough, and it seems that yet another stirring idea spurs him to create again. Again and…

And Then I Am Gone

And Then I Am Gone
Author: Mathias B. Freese
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
Total Pages: 107
Release: 2017-09-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1627875395

And Then I Am Gone: A Walk with Thoreau tells the story of a New York City man who becomes an Alabama man. Despite his radical migration to simpler living and a late-life marriage to a saint of sorts, his persistent pet anxieties and unanswerable questions follow him. Mathias Freese wants his retreat from the societal "it" to be a brave safari for the self rather than cowardly avoidance, so who better to guide him but Henry David Thoreau, the self-aware philosopher who retreated to Walden Pond "to live deliberately" and cease "the hurry and waste of life"? In this memoir, Freese wishes to share how and why he came to Harvest, Alabama (both literally and figuratively), to impart his existential impressions and concerns, and to leave his mark before he is gone.

In the Throes

In the Throes
Author: Mathias B. Freese
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2024-04-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

In the Throes explores the awakening of intelligence and the coming into awareness of an evolutionary mishap on a forbidding apocalyptic planet. The story follows eponymic Gruff, the first linguistic/metaphysical awakener of his species, as he navigates identity, mentation, and ontology in relation to the Gruff's natural prey: humankind. Combining the writings of Freud and the spiritual truths of Krishnamurti, author Mathias B. Freese depicts the Gruff as an evolutionary dark creature—disfigured, maimed, instinct-driven, and grotesque—until he attains self-awareness and transforms into a self of artistic expression and wisdom. As the title suggests, the reader identifies with self-struggle as it surges toward awakening and is moved by the apotheosis that closes the book. The nuanced theme: each one of us is an artist if only we take our selves in hand and construct a life of artistic expression. The closing chapters sing to us of Isak Dinesen's observation that an artist is never poor. A metaphor of the evolutionary self, In the Throes is a time-processed journey into awareness—our destiny as a species.

The i Tetralogy

The i Tetralogy
Author: Mathias B. Freese
Publisher: Mathias Freese
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1587364042

The i Tetralogy--i, I Am Gunther, Gunther's Lament, Gunther Redux--is the gut-wrenching epic depiction of the dehumanization of man through an incisive observation of three pivotal characters. Each of them, victim, perpetrator, and murderer's son, is inextricably linked by the varying dimensions of their moral nature. Assaying the monumental impact of the Holocaust, this species-shattering event, the tetralogy elucidates a truth about humanity: the Holocaust has forever defined the species as indelibly damaged, capable on a molecular level of killing and consuming its own. The reader experiences this unvarnished--perhaps axiomatic--truth about humanity, which no revisionist can deny. The reader also ponders the risk in forgetting, in sanitizing, in "sweetening" the Holocaust.

Descriptive Complexity, Canonisation, and Definable Graph Structure Theory

Descriptive Complexity, Canonisation, and Definable Graph Structure Theory
Author: Martin Grohe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 554
Release: 2017-08-17
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1108234305

Descriptive complexity theory establishes a connection between the computational complexity of algorithmic problems (the computational resources required to solve the problems) and their descriptive complexity (the language resources required to describe the problems). This groundbreaking book approaches descriptive complexity from the angle of modern structural graph theory, specifically graph minor theory. It develops a 'definable structure theory' concerned with the logical definability of graph theoretic concepts such as tree decompositions and embeddings. The first part starts with an introduction to the background, from logic, complexity, and graph theory, and develops the theory up to first applications in descriptive complexity theory and graph isomorphism testing. It may serve as the basis for a graduate-level course. The second part is more advanced and mainly devoted to the proof of a single, previously unpublished theorem: properties of graphs with excluded minors are decidable in polynomial time if, and only if, they are definable in fixed-point logic with counting.

Fractals in Probability and Analysis

Fractals in Probability and Analysis
Author: Christopher J. Bishop
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2017
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1107134110

A mathematically rigorous introduction to fractals, emphasizing examples and fundamental ideas while minimizing technicalities.

A Tale of Two Fractals

A Tale of Two Fractals
Author: A.A. Kirillov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0817683828

Since Benoit Mandelbrot's pioneering work in the late 1970s, scores of research articles and books have been published on the topic of fractals. Despite the volume of literature in the field, the general level of theoretical understanding has remained low; most work is aimed either at too mainstream an audience to achieve any depth or at too specialized a community to achieve widespread use. Written by celebrated mathematician and educator A.A. Kirillov, A Tale of Two Fractals is intended to help bridge this gap, providing an original treatment of fractals that is at once accessible to beginners and sufficiently rigorous for serious mathematicians. The work is designed to give young, non-specialist mathematicians a solid foundation in the theory of fractals, and, in the process, to equip them with exposure to a variety of geometric, analytical, and algebraic tools with applications across other areas.