Truth And Consequences

In December 2008, the world watched as master financier Bernard L. Madoff was taken away from his posh Manhattan apartment in handcuffs, accused of swindling thousands of innocent victims-including friends and family-out of billions of dollars in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. Madoff went to jail; he will spend the rest of his life there. But what happened to his devoted wife and sons? The people closest to him, the public reasoned, must have known the truth behind his astounding success. Had they been tricked, too? With unprecedented access to the surviving family members -- wife Ruth, son Andrew and his fiancéee Catherine Hooper -- journalist Laurie Sandell reveals the personal details behind the headlines. How did Andrew and Mark, the sons who'd spent their lives believing in and building their own families around their father's business first learn of the massive deception? How does a wife, who adored her husband since they were teenagers, begin to understand the ramifications of his actions? The Madoffs were a tight-knit and even claustrophobic clan, sticking together through marriages, divorces, and illnesses. But the pressures of enduring the massive scandal push them to their breaking points, most of all son Mark, whose suicide is one of the many tragedies that grew in the wake of the scandal. Muzzled by lawyers, vilified by the media and roundly condemned by the public, the Madoffs have chosen to keep their silence -- until now. Ultimately, theirs is one of the most riveting stories of our time: a modern-day Greek tragedy about money, power, lies, family, truth and consequences.

Over the years, Alison Lurie has earned a devoted readership for her satiric wit and storytelling acumen. With Truth and Consequences, described by the New Yorker as "a comedy of adultery with a comedy of academia thrown in," Lurie returns with a modern social satire that recalls the best of David Lodge and Mary McCarthy as well as her own popular university novels The War Between the Tates and Foreign Affairs. BACKCOVER: "A wily, shapely tale of love's labors lost." -Elle "A wry, insightful, thoroughly enjoyable tale about how men and women choose their demons and their lovers, and the sacrifices they're willing to make for both." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Delightful . . . Her characters are, as always, wonderfully imperfect." -The New York Review of Books

A 2002 Christianity Today Book of the Year! Postmodernism. The term slowly filtered into our vocabularies about three decades ago and now permeates most discussions of the humanities. Those who tout the promises and perils of this twentieth-century intellectual movement have filled many a bookshelf. And in a previous book, Postmodernizing the Faith: Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, Millard J. Erickson provided his own summary of several evangelical responses--both positive and negative--to the movement. Now in this book Erickson offers his own promised in-depth analysis and constructive response. What are the intellectual roots of postmodernism? Who are its most prominent exponents? What can we learn from their critique of modernism? Where do their assumptions and analyses fail us? Where do we go from here? What might a post-postmodernism look like? Erickson addresses these issues with characteristic discernment, clarity and evenhandedness, neither dismissing the insights of postmodern thought nor succumbing uncritically to its allure. An important book for all who are concerned with commending Christian truth to the culture within which we live.

Earth, water, fire, air, Aid me in this task I dare. Where Cole wanders let me see. As I will, So mote it be. Cole is working late, and her sisters are having a girls' night in, so on the spur of the moment, Phoebe accepts what seems like an innocent date with a friendly stranger. But good intentions are quickly misconstrued when Cole leaves work early to surprise Phoebe -- and is stunned to find her sharing a meal with another man. Cole can't believe that Phoebe would betray him, and Phoebe can't believe Cole would even think she'd betray him. Their escalating argument quickly highlights some fundamental trust issues they each harbor. But soon they discover themselves trapped in the underworld, at the center of a lovelorn demon's plot to destroy the Power of Three. If Cole and Phoebe can't reconcile their suspicions and insecurities, there's more than their own relationship at risk!

The essays in this collection are written by students, colleagues, and friends of Nuel Belnap to honor him on his sixtieth birthday. Our original plan was to include pieces from fonner students only, but we have deviated from this ever so slightly for a variety of personal and practical reasons. Belnap's research accomplishments are numerous and well known: He has founded (together with Alan Ross Anderson) a whole branch of logic known as "relevance logic." He has made contributions of fundamental importance to the logic of questions. His work in modal logic, fonnal pragmatics, and the theory of truth has been highly influential. And the list goes on. Belnap's accomplishments as a teacher are also distinguished and well known but, by virtue of the essential privacy of the teaching relationship, not so well understood. We would like to reflect a little on what makes him such an outstanding teacher.

Contemporary literary theory takes truth and meaning to be dependent on shared conventions in a community of discourse and views authors' intentions as irrelevant to interpretation. This view, argues Reed Way Dasenbrock, owes much to Anglo-American analytic philosophy as developed in the 1950s and 1960s by such thinkers as Austin and Kuhn, but it ignores more recent work by philosophers like Davidson and Putnam, who have mounted a counterattack on this earlier conventionalism. This book draws on current analytic philosophy to resuscitate the notion of objective truth and intentionalist models of meaning and interpretation, thereby moving beyond the antifoundationalism of postmodern theory. It addresses the work of Rorty and Fish as representative of literary conventionalism, discusses the futility of Derrida's anti-intentionalism, and shows how poststructuralist thinkers like Althusser and Foucault have contributed to the "new thematics" of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation that dominates literary theory today. Examining the counter-arguments of conventionalists to have their theory judged by its consequences, Dasenbrock shows how damaging this antiobjectivism and anti-intentionalism have been for literary studies.

Have you ever asked the question, does God exist? Have you ever wondered about the source of life on earthand in particular, human life? Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution are three approaches to answering these questions. While evolutionists are adamant that their claim has been proven to be a scientific fact, it turns out that their so-called proof uses an invalid logical argument. Hence, at this point in time, evolution is merely a conjecture and not a scientific fact. Instead of attempting to answer these questions through inductive arguments, Truth and Consequences offers a different logical approach that restates the questions as propositions. A proposition is a statement that is either true or false. Then the consequences of their respective truth values can be analyzed. The first proposition is: an Infinite Intelligent Entity (IIE) exists. If that proposition is true, it leads to a second proposition: the IIE created life on Earth, and in particular, human life. If both propositions are true, it leads to a third proposition: there is life after death. If any of these propositions are false, the bottom line is that it leads to a dead end. Ultimately, if these foundational propositions are true, it leads to a fourth proposition: Jesus lived some two-thousand years ago. By continuing to build on these propositions and follow their conclusions, we can better discuss not only the existence of God as such but also contemporary issues like modern-day threats to Christianity in America.

Short, sharp, and oftentimes shocking, Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments” have made his nightly MSNBC program, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, must-see viewing–and the fastest-growing news show on cable TV. In these segments, Olbermann calls out the perpetrators of mismanagement, brutality, cronyism, and the appalling lack of accountability at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In so doing, Olbermann goes where most of the mainstream media fear to tread–and his rapidly expanding audience eagerly follows. In Truth and Consequences, Olbermann collects the best of his Special Comments, presented here with additional observations and other new material. Whether taking to task the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and (the thankfully former) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who compare critics of the Iraq War to Nazi appeasers, or giving his impassioned perspective on why torture is un-American and what it really means to support our troops, or grilling timid lawmakers who fail to rein in presidential overreach and abuses of executive power, Olbermann’s devastatingly blunt (and at times wickedly funny) commentary cuts to the core of the duplicity and cynicism of a government that has lost the ability to distinguish between leading our great nation and ruling it. Naturally, Keith Olbermann’s candor and razor-sharp polemic have earned him many detractors and enemies. His antagonists in the media, such as Bill O’Reilly, have mocked him and accused him of rank intolerance. Yes, Keith Olbermann is intolerant–of hypocrisy, demagoguery, fear-mongering, and especially the equation of dissent with treason. In Truth and Consequences, he fights to reclaim for himself and all Americans the dignity of speaking one’s mind and acting on one’s conscience. Praise for Keith Olbermann “A truth-telling, Bush-bashing accidental liberal hero.” –New York “The most honest man in news . . . Olbermann clearly relishes his feuds and doesn’t seem to worry much about sparking new ones.” –Rolling Stone “Part Jon Stewart (the funny), Dennis Miller (the erudite and biting sub-references), [and] H. L. Mencken (the skewering of power and stupidity in equal doses) as well as crusading journalist . . . Olbermann has emerged as a kind of force of nature.” –San Francisco Chronicle “Intelligent, well-read, forceful and incisive.” –Rocky Mountain News