Most Popular Books by Paul Murray

Renewal of Catholic Higher Education: Essays on Catholic Studies in Honor of Don J. Briel celebrates twenty years of the Catholic Studies Program at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the leadership of Don J. Briel, PhD, in founding and guiding the development of the program. It arose from a conference to mark the anniversary at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, gathering Catholic Studies professors, alumni and other scholars to note the achievements of Catholic Studies and to reflect on the ways in which it can continue to impact Catholic higher education more broadly. The book opens with a foreword by George Weigel. The first section situates Catholic Studies within current challenges facing the university, and includes chapters from scholars such as Fr. Paul Murray, O.P., Michael Naughton, Jonathan Reyes and Russell Hittinger. The second section expounds the distinct pedagogy employed by Catholic Studies, as described by alumni and those who teach in Catholic Studies programs. It concludes with an afterward by Fr. Wilson Miscamble of the University of Notre Dame. In celebrating the first 20 years of Catholic Studies and the leadership of Don J. Briel, the book provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on the future challenges and opportunities for Catholic higher education. Catholic Studies emerged at a pivotal moment when Catholic universities began drifting from their religious identity and mission, and accepted the overspecialized and compartmentalized approaches of secular universities. Catholic Studies programs have made a significant step toward reuniting the various strands of university life, which began to unravel at this time. If Catholic Studies can fulfill three integrative tasks--reuniting faith and reason, faith and culture, and faith and life--it is poised to make a significant contribution toward the renewal of Catholic higher education. Renewal of Catholic Higher Education provides educators with an important opportunity to reflect on the nature of Catholic education and the steps needed to work towards its renewal.

Spiritual Warfare: A Training Guide is a dynamic resource intended to equip believers with biblical strategies, scripture-based prayers, and spiritual insights to triumph over the enemy''s attacks and walk in victory. This guide offers practical tools for standing firm in faith, engaging in warfare prayers, and breaking free from strongholds that impede spiritual growth. The booklet explores the reality of spiritual warfare, revealing the enemy''s tactics and teaching believers how to stand firm by utilizing the full Armor of God. Readers will learn to engage in intercessory prayer, binding and loosing, travailing prayer, and pleading the blood of Jesus for protection and breakthrough. It also offers guidance on declaring God''s promises, tearing down generational strongholds, and employing worship as a weapon against spiritual oppression. This guide provides step-by-step instructions, scripture references, and daily prayer strategies to empower believers to pray with authority and confidence. By applying these principles, readers will be equipped to defend against the enemy''s schemes, reclaim spiritual territory, and live victoriously in Christ.

In this comprehensive history of the Irish Boundary Commission, Paul Murray looks at British attempts from 1886 on to satisfy the Irish Nationalist demand for Home Rule, Ulster and British Unionist resistance to this demand, the 1920 partition of Ireland and the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, where the roots of the establishment of the Commission are to be found. The evidence presented at the Commission and the principles on which it based its decisions are analysed against the background of evolving British views on the dangers posed for British and Unionist interests on both islands by a radical redrawing of the 1920 border. New documentary evidence is brought to bear on the motivation of its Chairman Justice Feetham, his susceptibility to external influences, and the significance of his political background as possible factors in his final decisions. The history of the Irish Boundary Commission is shown to also be part of a larger European narrative. This study is, thus, the first large-scale attempt to consider its significance in its wider international context.

Looser flanqué d''un génie obèse pour meilleur ami, fou de la jolie mais inaccessible Lori, traqué par un dealer psychopathe, Skippy tente de survivre à Seabrook, internat dublinois catholique où les adultes sont tous des lâches ou des salauds. L''enfer. Jusqu''à ce concours de mangeurs de beignets qui pourrait bien créer la surprise, une surprise de taille... Brutal et sublime, un roman d''apprentissage aussi désopilant que désespéré, qui livre un portrait acide de l''adolescence.

This first full-length study of English society In the fifteenth century draws upon contemporary narratives of travelers, the Paston Letters and many less widely known collections of correspondence, observations of French and Italian diplomats, town records, ecclesiastical reports, the literature of the age, chronicles, household and estate accounts, Chancery proceedings, and other revealing sources in order to recreate the substance and flavor of life at that time. Contrary to Shakespeare and popular belief, the Wars of the Roses had comparatively little effect upon the lives of the people as a whole and represented a recovery from, rather than a descent into, anarchy.--From publisher description

The work presented in this thesis focuses on extending a transform from Mathematical Morphology, known as the Hit-or-Miss transform (HMT), in order to make it more robust for detecting features of interest in the presence of noise in digital images. The extension that is described here requires that a single parameter is determined for correct functionality. A novel design tool which allows this parameter to be accurately estimated is proposed as part of this work. An efficient method for computing the extended transform is also presented. The HMT is a well known morphological transform that is capable of identifying features in digital images. When image features contain noise, texture or some other distortion, the HMT may fail. Various researchers have extended the HMT in different ways to make it more robust to noise. The most successful, and most recent extensions of the HMT for noise robustness, use rank order operators in place of standard morphological erosions and dilations. A major issue with most of these methods is that no technique is provided for calculating the parameters that are introduced to generalise the HMT, and, in most cases, these parameters are determined empirically. In this thesis, a new conceptual interpretation of the HMT is presented which uses percentage occupancy (PO) functions to implement the erosion and dilation operators of the HMT. When implemented in this way, the strictness of these PO functions can easily be relaxed in order to allow slacker fitting of the structuring elements. Relaxing the strict conditions of the transform is shown to improve the performance of the routine when processing noisy data. This thesis also introduces a novel design tool which is derived directly from the operators that are used to implement the aforementioned PO functions. This design tool can be used to determine a suitable value for the only parameter in the proposed extension of the HMT. Further, it can be used to estimate parameters for other generalisations of the HMT that have been described in the literature in order to improve their noise robustness. The power of the proposed technique is demonstrated and tested using sets of very noisy images. Further, a number of comparisons are performed in order to validate the method that is introduced in this work when compared with the most recent extensions of the HMT. One drawback with this method is that a direct implementation of the technique is computationally expensive. However, it is possible to implement the proposed method using rank-order filters in place of the percentage occupancy functions. Rank order filters are used in a multitude of image processing tasks. Their application can range from simple pre-processing tasks which aim to reduce/remove noise, to more complex problems where such filters can be used in combination to detect and segment image features. There is, therefore, a need to develop fast algorithms to compute the output of this class of filter in general. A number of methods for efficiently computing the output of specific rank order filters have been presented over the years. For example, numerous fast algorithms exist that can be used for calculating the output of the median filter. Fast algorithms for calculating morphological erosions and dilations - which, like the median filter, are a special case of the more general rank order filter - have also been proposed. In this thesis, these techniques are extended and combined such that it is possible to efficiently compute any rank, using any arbitrarily shaped window, making it possible to quickly compute the output of any rank order filter. The fast algorithm which is described is compared to an optimised technique for computing the output of this class of filter, and significant gains in speed are demonstrated when using the proposed technique. Further, it is shown that this efficient filtering algorithm can be used to produce an extremely fast implementation of the generalised HMT that is described in this work. The fast generalised HMT is compared with a number of other extensions and generalisations of the HMT that have been proposed in the literature over the years.