Rick Kennedy

Finneytown, a dynamic first-ring suburb of Cincinnati, continues to display the optimism and civic spirit that transformed this community during the post-World War II economic and population boom. A tiny rural settlement for 140 years, Finneytown's population from 1946 to 1970 quadrupled as young people filled its new residential subdivisions, schools, businesses, and churches. Finneytown celebrates this "creation story." Seemingly overnight, farms and open fields gave way to streets carved out for cookie-cutter houses as well as stately, custom-built homes, including Mid-Century Modern designs prized today as architectural timepieces. This wide variety of housing drove Finneytown's economic diversity, while enthusiastic support of its public and private schools defined the small community's values. Some Finneytown residents throughout its history, such as television writer Rod Serling and illustrator Charley Harper, are known worldwide. Even a potato chip popular across the globe was named after a Finneytown street--Pringle Drive. Rick Kennedy is a retired media relations manager for General Electric and author of three books, Jelly Roll, Bix & Hoagy, Little Labels--Big Sound, and GE Aviation: 100 Years of Reimagining Flight. Mark Evans is a retired product development manager for Procter & Gamble, a product development consultant, and an accomplished photographer. Kennedy and Evans, along with their wives, Jane and Chris, respectively, are longtime and active Finneytown residents.

The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers offers a new translation of the Greek alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. For the first time in an English translation, this volume provides: extensive background and contextual notes significant variant readings in the alphabetical manuscripts and textual differences vis-à-vis the systematic and anonymous Apophthegmata reference notes to both quotations from Scriptures and the many allusions to Scripture in the sayings and stories. In addition, there is an extensive glossary that offers information and further resources on people, places, and significant monastic vocabulary. Perfect for students and enthusiasts of the desert tradition.

Winds of Santa Ana is a spiritual history, environmental study, and sailing memoir of Southern California's coast, islands, and waters.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was America's most famous pastor and scholar at the beginning of the eighteenth century. People today generally associate him with the infamous Salem witch trials, but that picture has mostly come down to us from one unreliable, antagonistic source.This biography by Rick Kennedy, based largely on new research by an international team of scholars, corrects misconceptions of Cotton Mather and focuses on the way he tried to promote, socially and intellectually, a biblical lifestyle. As older Puritan hopes in New England were giving way to a broader and shallower Protestantism, Mather led a populist, Bible-oriented movement that embraced the new century -- the beginning of a dynamic evangelical tradition that eventually became a major force in American culture.

Written in the genre of Henry David Thoreau's travel-thinking essays, Jesus, History, and Mount Darwin: An Academic Excursion is the story of a three-day climb into the Evolution Range of the High Sierra mountains of California. Mount Darwin stands among other mountains near fourteen thousand feet high and that are named after promoters of religious versions of evolutionary thinking. Rick Kennedy, a history professor from Point Loma, uses the climb as an opportunity to think about general education and how both the natural history of evolution and the ancient history of Jesus can find a home in the Aristotelian diversity of university methods. Kennedy offers the academic foundations for the credibility and reliability of accounts of Jesus in the New Testament, while pointing out that these foundations have the same weaknesses and strengths that ancient history has in general. Natural history, Kennedy points out, has a different set of strengths and weaknesses from ancient history. Overall, the book reminds students and professors of the wisdom in being humble. Rick Kennedy is Professor of History at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. He is the author of A History of Reasonableness: Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking (2004).

A defense of the social operation of thinking, with an emphasis on testimony and authority. This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of the twentieth century. Representative of the tradition is John Locke's story of a King of Siam who rejected reports of the existence of ice. The King would have hadto risk too much trust in another man whom he did not know too well -- a Dutch ambassador -- in order to believe that elephants could walk on cold water. John Locke presented the story to encourage his readers to think about theresponsibilities and risks entailed in what he called 'the gentle and fair ways of information.' The art of thinking is largely social. Popular textbook writers such as Quintilian, Boethius, Philipp Melanchthon, John of St.Thomas, Antoine Arnauld, Thomas Reid, Isaac Watts, Richard Whately, William Hamilton, L. Susan Stebbings, and Max Black taught strategies of belief, trust, assent, and even submission as part of reasonableness. For over two thousand years testimony and authority were at the center of lively discussions about teaching the art of thinking. In the twentieth century the tradition faltered largely due to Immanuel Kant's insistence that there should be no distinction between handling testimony and personal experience. This book recounts the history of a lively educational tradition and hopes to encourage its revival. Rick Kennedy, whose previous books and articles have beenabout Colonial American logic, mathematics, and science, is Professor of History at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Now in paperback! Little Labels —Big Sound Small Record Companies and the Rise of American Music Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt Foreword by Al Kooper A wild ride through American popular music. "[T]hese cats had their ears to the ground and cut vinyl that created the hip sounds of the day, sounds that still reverberate today. . . . Little Labels—Big Sound is a great primer into the history of these . . . independent record labels." —Blue Suede News "[L]ike the labels it celebrates and the 45s and the 78s those labels put out . . . full of exciting and vital content." —San Francisco Chronicle "In this straightforward and engaging collection of histories and profiles, the authors present a brisk overview of important indies and a look at several distinctive companies and the men who ran them . . ." —Billboard "Show me a man today who could stand up to a Syd Nathan or a Don Robey, and I'll show you a man behind bars—not behind a desk. Why, without Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records and the man who unearthed Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Rufus Thomas, and Howling Wolf to name but a few, there might not even have been any rock 'n' roll, electric blues, or rockabilly music." —Al Kooper, from the Foreword Rick Kennedy, a media relations manager and former journalist, is author of Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy (Indiana University Press). Randy McNutt, a longtime reporter with the Cincinnati Enquirer, is author of We Wanna Boogie and a book on Ohio ghost towns. March 2001 (cloth 1999) 224 pages, 33 b&w photos, 6 x 9, notes, bibl., index, append. cloth0-253-33548-5$24.95 t / £18.95 paper0-253-21434-3$17.95 t / £13.95