This book explores how and why the New Zealand government made progress and how the program was able to create and sustain the commitment of public servants and unleash the creativity of public entrepreneurs.The authors combine case studies based on the experience of people involved in the change, together with public management research. They explain how ambitious targets and public accountability were used as levers to overcome the bureaucratic barriers that impeded public service delivery, and how data, evidence, and innovation were used to change practice. New Zealand experimented, failed, succeeded, and learned from the experience over five years. This New Zealand experience demonstrates that interagency performance targets are a potentially powerful tool for fostering better public services and thus improving social outcomes.
The northern pike-sometimes affectionately known as the “aquatic wolf”-is one of the most sought after and mythologized fishes in Minnesota, but until now there have been few books devoted to the history and ecological management of the species. Based on pioneering research carried out in Minnesota by leading pike specialist Rodney B. Pierce, Northern Pike Ecology, Conservation, and Management History is the most complete collection of information to date on the species, for everyone from scientists and conservation biologists to general readers and recreational anglers.A tremendously important game fish and resource both in Minnesota and throughout the northern hemisphere, northern pike populations directly reflect local geology and human influence, playing a key role in the health of freshwater ecosystems. As urbanization spreads and the human population continues to grow, pike populations face increasing pressure, requiring new ways of looking at and managing the species. In Minnesota, groundbreaking work has been conducted on northern pike: analyses of stocking success and investigations into the relationships within fish communities, the management of rearing marshes, environmental effects on natural production, the genetics of northern pike, and strategies for scientifically monitoring pike. The state has been a leader in developing fishing regulations to help restore large pike, among many other measures designed to ensure the future quantity and health of a key species in Minnesota’s waterways.Weaving significant historical scientific literature and technical details together with his own research, Pierce’s benchmark study documents and synthesizes the long history of northern pike management and describes the latest efforts being taken to better understand and manage this critical and renowned species.
Jones has a lyrical mind and meanders through memory and imagination in his poems, fusing them and making them work to surprise the reader with intriguing and challenging images. The collection builds beautifully, each section nurturing the others, and all of it displays Jones’s fine talent—keenly intelligent, human, and compassionate. His quick, splendid sense of humour surprises the reader, playing one image off another that is seemingly unrelated to the first, yet achieving a sense of rightness in poem after poem.
This study analyzes the symbiotic relationship between rhetoric and homiletics. The proposed interface between the two disciplines is metaphor. Contemporary research on metaphor in philosophy, rhetoric, sociology, and theology is employed to produce a rhetorical/metaphorical homiletics. This work attempts to return rhetoric to its traditional position as a conversation partner with homiletics. The author argues that a metaphorical, rhetorical approach to preaching is more faithful to the scriptures than the classical dependence on the canons of formal logic. The use of metaphor allows the preacher to choose the imagination over the rational paradigm as he/she creates new worlds of meaning for congregations.
In our global community, it is critical that we appreciate how our humanity, throughout time in its cultural diversity, has defined its relationship with the world. This pragmatic workbook provides an accessible methodology, 'Eye Juggling,' for interpreting the values of others as well as one's own values that have rendered the world meaningful. In doing so, the reader is given an opportunity to explore, discover, and interpret for him or herself, and become an 'authority' on the values revealed.
Temporal Deixis of the Greek Verb provides a detailed grammatical study of the Greek verb in the Gospel of Mark focused on the question of temporal reference. Following the theory of verbal aspect proposed by several recent scholars, this book distinguishes between aspect and Aktionsart, semantics and pragmatics. It argues that temporal reference is not grammaticalized by the tenses of the Greek verb. Instead, koine Greek indicates these relationships through contextual means (temporal deixis). The full temporal range of usage of the verb in Mark's Gospel is examined, deictic indicators are catalogued, and selected passages are used to illustrate the ways in which time is indicated. This linguistic study provides a basis for more accurate exegesis of the text of Mark and other similar writings.
A presentation of strategies for managing woody plants and using research data to select the most appropriate control methods. It analyzes the responses of over 370 North American woody plants to commercially available herbicides. The authors provide methods to manage woody plants that interfere with recreation, watershed yield, animal and plant diversity, resource conservation, wildlife and livestock needs, and wood production on grazing, forest, and related land.
Serves as a comprehensive review to the substantial impact of gene amplification in molecular biology, genetic engineering and medical science. The book covers the mechanism of gene amplification, organization and structure of amplified genes.
Hank Rivera, one-time activist and now full-time construction worker, has just been evicted from his home in Waikiki and is forced to move to the Wai'anae coast. While in the midst of moving, Hank and his wife, Kanani, are approached by a college student researching the early years of Hawai'i's modern civil rights movement, which culminated in the rigorous protests surrounding the bombing of Kaho'olawe in 1976. Hesitant at first, Hank and Kanani agree to talk about the past and their role in the movement. Vivid and sometimes painful memories surface, causing both of them to question their feelings of love and loyalty - not only for each other, but for their heritage. Through the voices of Hank, Kanani, and others, Rodney Morales tells a thoroughly contemporary story of Hawai'i - one that addresses the realities of asserting one's culture in a multicultural world.
Set in Honolulu during the summer of 2007, Rodney Morales’s For a Song melds actual events into an edgy detective novel that evokes contemporary Hawai‘i as a place where the hauntingly beautiful and the hauntingly tragic too often intersect. Against a backdrop of political scandal and police corruption, the richly complex plot is driven by true-to-life characters and crisp dialogue.David “Kawika” Apana is a reporter turned private detective who has hit rock bottom. Divorced and broke, his career is resuscitated when he gambles all and wins in a game of high stakes poker. He accepts a deal to trade in most of his winnings for a boat, which becomes his new home and office. His first client is a vivacious middle-aged blonde, Minerva Alter, who hires him to find her missing daughter, Caroline “Kay” Johnson, a budding filmmaker and activist in her twenties. Apana is startled to learn that Minerva was once married to Lino Johnson, a petty criminal brazenly gunned down in Honolulu’s Chinatown eighteen years earlier—an unsolved murder he covered during his reporter days.As Apana undertakes the investigation, he finds it opens a widening network of intrigue that includes Kay’s missing boyfriend and her murdered father. With her film project and her activism, especially that of challenging a planned development on conservation land, Kay has been a thorn in the side of Hawai‘i’s powers that be. Apana’s pursuit of leads takes him all over O‘ahu: from the metro downtown area, to the Windward and Leeward coasts, to the fabled North Shore, and to places beyond. It also takes him back in years as he revisits the Lino Johnson murder and discovers how much he had missed the first time around.
Providing graded readings in Koine Greek from the New Testament, Septuagint, Apostolic Fathers, and early creeds, this unique text integrates the full range of materials needed by intermediate Greek students. Its many features include four helpful vocabulary lists, numerous references to other resources, assorted translation helps, a review of basic grammar and syntax, and an introduction to BDAG--the standard Greek lexicon.
Muriel Spark's witty novels have long been appreciated by critics. Yet previous studies have been synoptic, trying to cover the entire oeuvre of an immensely prolific novelist. By selecting novels representative of distinct phases in Spark's career, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe is able to explore theme, style, and structure in a detailed way. Spark's conversion to Catholicism is frequently cited as a source of her novelistic voice, the one vocation being seen to result from the other. Edgecombe takes up this issue, showing, through judicious close readings of the novels, how the idea of vocation - whether religious or secular - provides a recurring centre of interest and thematic unity for the poet-turned-novelist. He explores the nature of the voice that finds its outlet in what he calls the epigrammatic structure of Sparks's fiction. Edgecombe shows her best novels to be elegantly incomplete, heavy with implied meaning, and all the more moving for their emotional restraint. This structure of expanded epigram, he argues, is the hallmark of Spark's fiction and is essential to its success. From Spark's early period, which focuses on tight-knit British communities, Edgecombe selects ""The Bachelors"" and ""The Girls of Slender Means"", two novels that flank her most famous works and share their density and conciseness. Viewing ""The Mandelbaum Gate"" an expansive departure from that early phase, he examines it on its own, before turning to the ""exilic era"" of Spark's residence abroad. From this he selects ""The Abbess of Crewe"" and ""The Takeover"", each representing different aspects of a problematic phase in Spark's career.
"Scant decades ago most Westerners agreed that . . . Lifelong monogamy was ideal . . . Mothers should stay home with children . . . premarital sex was to be discouraged . . . Heterosexuality was the unquestioned norm . . . popular culture should not corrupt children. Today not a single one of these expectations is uncontroversial." So writes Rodney Clapp in assessing the status of the family in postmodern Western society. In response many evangelicals have been quick to defend the so-called traditional family, assuming that it exemplifies the biblical model. Clapp challenges that assumption, arguing that the "traditional" family is a reflection more of the nineteenth-century middle-class family than of any family one can find in Scripture. At the same time, he recognizes that many modern and postmodern options are not acceptable to Christians. Returning to the biblical story afresh to see what it might say to us in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Clapp articulates a challenge to both sides of a critical debate. A book to help us rethink the significance of the family for the next century.
Christians feel increasingly useless, argues Rodney Clapp, not because they have nothing to offer a post-Christian society, but because they are trying to serve as "sponsoring chaplins" to a civilization that no longer sees Christianity as necessary to its existence. In the individualistic, technologically oriented, consumer-based culture, Christianity has become largely irrelevant. Writing inclusively with considerable verve, Clapp offer a keen analysis of the church and its ministry as we face a new miillennium.
Spirituality often evokes images of quiet centeredness, meditative serenity and freedom from life's pressures. It?s become a chic commodity, with its benefits evoked by images of sunrises and secluded retreats. Contrast the apostle Paul, who promotes a cross-shaped spirituality for fools making their way though life's trials. Paul realized that images of crucifixion, burial and resurrection would never be popular images of the spiritual life. So he encourages his fellow travelers, who are spiritually united with Christ, to "follow me as I follow Christ." As he explores this ancient spiritual path, Rodney Reeves probes our understanding of what Christian spirituality should be. And to illuminate its transformative power, he gives us living illustrations of what it means to follow Paul as he followed Christ. Here is a book that joins a deep understanding of Paul with a pastoral and spiritual wisdom born of experience.
Rodney A. Whitacre edits this pastorally-oriented commentary that includes background material concerning authorship, date and purpose, as well as a summary of important theological themes. A passage-by-passage exposition follows that focuses on understanding what John had to say to his original readers in order to see its relevance for the church today.
Biblical Foundations Book Awards Finalist Through all of John's works, a consistent message is woven: being a Christian is about abiding in Christ and in his words. The Gospel of John, the epistle of 1 John, and the Apocalypse all begin in the same way: by pointing to the importance of knowing the Word, both written and incarnate. Using an artistic, storytelling approach to spirituality, John relies heavily on readers' imaginations to help them see what it takes to become disciples by abiding in Jesus. Rodney Reeves combines exegesis with spiritual reflection to explore how the only biblical writer to employ three different genres presents a consistent vision of Christian spirituality. Rather than focusing on detailed instructions, John uses evocative metaphors and illustrations so that readers can envision how to follow Jesus—as disciples, in community, and even at the end of the world. Filled with stories and implications for today's readers, Spirituality According to John provides an accessible introduction to the rich spiritual world of the Johannine literature that makes up much of the New Testament. In John's era and now, anyone who has ears to hear can learn to truly abide in Christ.
Selected as an outstanding book in vascular surgery by members of the Society for Vascular Surgery.* This unique new text describes the current understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis of human atherosclerosis. It also details the methods for quantitating and characterizing both experimental and clinical lesions, and describes the methods for preparing available animal models. Providing an in-depth review of each of these topics, the text organizes the information in one volume for the convenience of the reader. The text is divided into two sections. First is a description of the cell biology, biochemistry and pharmacology of normal vessels and of atherosclerotic human lesions, with details of the methods to accurately characterize and quantitate the disease. Secondly, it presents a description of the methods for preparing the available experimental animal models, including a discussion of the distribution and pathological characteristics of the lesions. It also includes comparisons of human atherosclerosis and experimental animal models. Intended to provide a basis for expediting future research in this priority health care area, this text compiles the available information for those who treat patients with atherosclerosis or who are involved in atherosclerosis research. It is of particular interest to students, physicians, and academic and commercial researchers.
