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Books on Discount: An Afternoon's Dictation (Greenebaum)

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  In commemoration of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, MSI Press is making the award-winning ecumenical book,   An Afternoon's Dictation  (Greenebaum), available on Kindle countdown January 18-25. In addition, the paperback edition is available from the MSI Press webstore at 1/3 off for this week:  An Afternoon's Dictation: Inclusive Revelation for the Twenty-First Century - MSI Press MSI Press Book Description:  In 1999 Steven Greenebaum felt he'd hit the wall. Fifty years old, he could not make sense of his life or the world around him. For several months he angrily demanded answers from God, if God were there. One afternoon, an inner voice told him to get a pen and paper and write. Steven then took dictation - three pages, not of commandments but guidance for leading a meaningful life.   An Afternoon's Dictation  grapples with, organizes, and deeply explores the revelations Steven received and then studied for over ten years. His sharing is N...

๐ŸŒฟ Christian Unity Week: Remembering That the Abrahamic Traditions Are Family

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  One of the quiet truths of Christian Unity Week is that Christianity doesn’t stand alone. It’s part of a much older, wider family — the Abrahamic traditions — that includes Judaism and Islam. Three faiths, three histories, three ways of seeking God… and yet so much shared ground. We trace our spiritual ancestry to the same stories. We honor many of the same prophets. We wrestle with the same questions about justice, mercy, and what it means to live a life that reflects the Holy. And like any family, we’ve had our share of arguments. Sometimes the disagreements have been painful. Sometimes they’ve been about identity, power, or fear. But underneath all of that, there’s a deeper truth: we quarrel in part because we’re close. Because we recognize something of ourselves in one another. Because our stories overlap, our scriptures echo each other, and our visions of a just world often align more than we admit. Christian Unity Week invites us to remember that unity isn’t only an i...

Stuck at Level 3: How Diagnostic Assessment Finds the Patterns You Can’t See

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  Most learners at Level 3 think they know what their problems are. They’ll say, “I need more vocabulary,” or “My listening is bad,” or “I always mess up the grammar.” But here’s the truth: What you think your gaps are, and what your gaps actually are , rarely match. That’s where Diagnostic Assessment — DA — comes in. If Level 4 is the land of nuance, precision, and near‑native control, DA is the mapmaker. It shows you the terrain of your own language use: the habits, the blind spots, the micro‑skills you’ve been skipping over for years. ๐Ÿ” What DA Actually Does DA is not a test. It’s an X‑ray. Instead of ranking you on a scale, it breaks your performance into skills , subskills , and micro‑operations — the tiny things that make the difference between “advanced” and “near‑native.” Research in cognitive diagnostic assessment shows that DA can reveal fine‑grained patterns that traditional tests completely miss. Even learners with identical scores often have totally diffe...

Publisher's Pride: Books on Bestseller Lists - How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately (Shekhtman)

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  Today's Publisher's Pride is  How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately  by Boris Shekhtman, which reached  #6 in study and teaching references . the successful practices of diplomats and international journalists now available to any language learner Book description: This is the fifth edition of a popular book that provides a unique set of tools designed to enhance an individual's success in communicati0n in a foreign language environment. The devices presented allow the speaker of a foreign language to demonstrate the level of his/her language more impressively, so impressively, in fact, that it appears that the speaker's language itself has improved overnight. These techniques were developed and tested by the author with adult professionals in such varied fields as journalism, diplomacy, government, and international business. Many of these professionals have attested to the efficacy of these tools in their own columns. "This book provides the most ban...