You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book incorporates the author's personal experience and scholarly work concerning ritual, sacred space, self-identity, and narrative.
Sarah Pike traces the history of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States from their origins in the nineteenth century to their reemergence in the 1960s counterculture. She also considers the differences and similarities between the New Age and Neopagan movements as well as the antagonistic relationship between these two practices and other religions in America, particularly Christianity. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, she offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. Her book is a rich analysis of these spiritual worlds and social networks and questions why these faiths are flourishing at this point in American history.
For the Wild explores the ways in which the commitments of radical environmental and animal-rights activists develop through powerful experiences with the more-than-human world during childhood and young adulthood. The book addresses the question of how and why activists come to value nonhuman animals and the natural world as worthy of protection. Emotions and memories of wonder, love, compassion, anger, and grief shape activists’ protest practices and help us understand their deep-rooted dedicaztion to the planet and its creatures. Drawing on analyses of activist art, music, and writings, as well as interviews and participant-observation in activist communities, Sarah M. Pike delves into the sacred duties of these often misunderstood and marginalized groups with openness and sensitivity.
This book marks twenty years since the publication of Professor Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon, a major contribution to the historical study of Wicca. Building on and celebrating Hutton’s pioneering work, the chapters in this volume explore a range of modern magical, occult, and Pagan groups active in Western nations. Each contributor is a specialist in the study of modern Paganism and occultism, although differ in their embrace of historical, anthropological, and psychological perspectives. Chapters examine not only the history of Wicca, the largest and best-known form of modern Paganism, but also modern Pagan environmentalist and anti-nuclear activism, the Pagan interpretation of fairy folklore, and the contemporary ‘Traditional Witchcraft’ phenomenon.
MORE THAN 3 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “A stunningly honest, engrossing account . . . Shirley MacLaine’s discovery of a new sense of purpose, joy, energy, and love will touch and astonish you.”—Literary Guild Magazine An outspoken thinker, a celebrated actress, a truly independent woman, Shirley MacLaine takes us on an intimate yet powerful journey into her personal life and inner self. An intense, clandestine love affair with a prominent politician sparks Shirley’s quest of self-discovery. From Stockholm to Hawaii to the mountain vastness of Peru, from disbelief to radiant affirmation, she at last discovers the roots of her very existence . . . and the infinite possibilities of life. Shirley opens her heart to explore the meaning of a great and enduring passion with her lover Gerry; the mystery of her soul’s connection with her best friend David; the tantalizing secrets behind a great actor’s inspiration with the late Peter Sellers. And through it all, Shirley’s courage and candor opens new doors, new insights, new revelations—and a luminous new world she invites us all to share.
Ritual and Democracy explores the complex intersections of ritual and democracy in a range of contemporary, cultural and geographic contexts.
A gripping YA thriller from award-winning writer Juno Dawson, with a dash of romance and intriguing paranormal elements, set in Hollow Pike - a small town with a big history of witchcraft. Something wicked this way comes... She thought she'd be safe in the country, but you can't escape your own nightmares, and Lis London dreams repeatedly that someone is trying to kill her. Lis thinks she's being paranoid - after all, who would want to murder her? She doesn't believe in the local legends of witchcraft. She doesn't believe that anything bad will really happen to her. You never do, do you? Not until you're alone in the woods, after dark - and a twig snaps... Hollow Pike - where witchcraft never sleeps.
Disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement, a new, more radical kind of environmental activist emerged in the 1980s. Radical environmentalists used direct action, from blockades and tree-sits to industrial sabotage, to save a wild nature that they believed to be in a state of crisis. Questioning the premises of liberal humanism, they subscribed to an ecocentric philosophy that attributed as much value to nature as to people. Although critics dismissed them as marginal, radicals posed a vital question that mainstream groups too often ignored: Is environmentalism a matter of common sense or a fundamental critique of the modern world? In The Ecocentrists, Keith Makoto Woodhouse off...
In this study of gerontological ethics and long-term care, Moses offers a history of the ethics of caregiving, an analysis of the present situation vis-a-vis contemporary society and Christian perspectives, and models for future care that incorporate an ethical responsibility to care. At this historical moment where an aging population, advances in medical care, and the rising costs of such care across the board have made ethics of health care a pressing national question, Ethics and the Elderly offers timely and useful reflections for ethicists, pastoral care givers, and medical providers. Academically sound and written at an accessible level, it will be a valuable text for courses in medical ethics and Catholic moral theology, and will also appeal to non-academic audiences dealing with the growing field of eldercare. (Publisher).