New Items

Planning to speak with Jehovah's Witnesses? First, read our new booklet:
How to Get Jehovah's Witnesses to LISTEN.

Other new items on our order form include a tape of the talk "Europe's Crackdown on Cults and How JWs Are Fighting Back" by David Reed (from October's Witnesses Now for Jesus convention).

Also, glossy reprints of Dr. Osamu Muramoto's recent article "Bioethics of the refusal of blood by Jehovah's Witnesses: part 1. Should bioethical deliberation consider dissidents' views?" from the Journal of Medical Ethics. This excellent piece covers medical, historical, biblical, and ethical information. He notes, "Perhaps the most peculiar and inconsistent aspect of the JW policy is that they may accept all of the individual components of blood plasma, as long as they are not taken at the same time."

Our popular book How to Rescue Your Loved One from the Watchtower has gone out of print. We discovered this when we attempted to re-stock our shelves and found none in stock at the distributor and at the publisher's warehouse.

(The publisher was supposed to notify us in advance, but someone was asleep at the switch.)

The dozen copies we had in stock were quickly exhausted, so the book is simply unavailable, unless you find it still on the shelf at a Christian bookstore.
Because the book is included on the new Baker Digital Reference Library CD-ROM, reprint rights have not reverted to the author, so we can not have it printed by another publisher. People seeking to rescue a loved one should be referred to the CD or to our new booklet How to Get Jehovah's Witnesses to Listen.

Our book Jehovah's Witness Literature: A Critical Guide to Watchtower Publications has also gone out of print and will not be reprinted in the foreseeable future. It is included on the new Baker Digital Reference Library CD-ROM, and we were also able to buy up the publisher's remaining stock. So, we have a limited supply available, but when that supply is exhausted the book will be unavailable.

The dreaded Y2K disaster struck early for a handful of Comments from the Friends subscribers who ordered 2-year or 3-year subscription renewals ending in the year 2000.

Our Macintosh computers were supposedly exempt from the predicted disaster, since Macs were designed with calendars extending well into the new millennium. But software is a different story, we discovered.

Our computer appeared to accept each subscription's year-2000 expiration date, but later scrambled it unbeknownst to us.

The problem surfaced later, when one of the affected subscribers purchased a book, and her record came on screen showing an expiration date of 47/9R/32--obviously an error!

We have been using Main Street Filer software to maintain the Comments mailing list since 1984, and the manufacturer has long since gone out of business. But we have developed a work-around for the software program that fixes the problem.

Still, there were a handful of subscribers who sent in long-term renewals before the bug was fixed, and who missed some issues of Comments due to a scrambled Y2K expiration date. Our apologies to those affected!

Twenty percent of JW congregations worldwide are Spanish-speaking, according to recent data from WT headquarters.

Yet, Edition VIDA (LIFE Publishers) has cancelled reprinting the Spanish translation of Jehovah's Witnesses Answered Verse by Verse (Respuestas Bíblicas a los Testigos de Jehová).