Merritt

Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as well as new usage notes, hints for choosing between similar words, a Word Finder section organized by subject, and a comprehensive language guide. The text is also peppered with thought-provoking reflections on favorite (and not-so-favorite) words by noted contemporary writers, including Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester, many newly commissioned for this edition. The third edition revises and updates this innovative reference, adding hundreds of new words, senses, and phrases to its more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms. New features in this edition include over 200 literary and humorous quotations highlighting notable usages of words, and a revised graphical word toolkit feature showing common word combinations based on evidence in the Oxford Corpus. There is also a new introduction by noted language commentator Ben Zimmer.

Paul, not Jesus, invented modern day Christianity. Jesus (The Master) was a Jew. He was born a Jew. He taught as a Jew and He died as a Jew. During His day He taught the Law. It was His approach to the Law that is one of the many reasons He's remembered (and that teaching is exposed here). Many replaced Paul's love and faith in Jesus for living the Christ like life. Religion with its rules and regulations tacitly disguises love as some sort of dominants. (Some religions disguise peace as war.) Want to be a mental prisoner? Religion doesn't like it if you remain outside its sphere of influence, an issue of control. Religion is suitable for your neighbor but for some it can be inconsistent with your life. But that doesn't mean you can't learn from it. Spirituality is the act of being alive. Spiritually has no rules and regulation, and it wishes to dominate nothing yet no one can escape from it. Labels are tasteless, useless and superfluous. What is revealed here is for everybody.