The second of two volumes on the relationship between popular religion and the self-help tradition in American culture, this book continues chronologically where the first left off. As with the first volume, this work focuses on the intersection of American history and popular religion and is intended as an introductory interpretive guide to major self-help figures and movements with origins in popular religious movements. This volume spans from Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the history of Christian Science, with discussions of Mary Baker Patterson, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy, through Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Peale and Schuller, with the exception of Evangelist Billy Graham, constitute the public face of mainstream American Protestantism and bring this two-volume study to its conclusion in the second half of the 20th century.

This reference will serve as a valuable research tool for American religion and popular culture scholars. Together with the first volume, "Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture," these two meticulously researched volumes clearly define and present the broad scope of the self-help tradition as it pervades American culture and as it developed and was influenced by popular religion. An extensive bibliography is included.

The Rhetoric of Religious Cults takes as its departure point the notion that 'cults' have a distinctive language and way of recruiting members. First outlining a rhetorical framework, which encompasses contemporary discourse analysis, the persuasive texts of three movements - Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and Children of God - are analysed in detail and their discourse compared with other kinds of recruitment literature. Cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself.

This is the first investigation of the history of Russian Freemasonry, based on the premise that the facts of the Russian Enlightenment preclude application of the interpretative framework commonly used for the history of western thought. Coverage includes the development of early Russian masonry, the formation of the Novikov circle in Moscow, the programme of Rosicrucianism and its Russian variant and, finally, the clash between the Rosicrucians and the State.

The New Atheists' claim that religion always leads to fanaticism is baseless. State-backed religion results in tyranny. Sacred humanists work to implement their highest values that will improve this world; separation of church and state, eliminating denigration of nonbelievers, assuring just governance, and preventing human trafficking.

The Book of Black Magic is Arthur Edward Waite's magnum opus of occult lore; this edition contains the author's original icons, symbols, seals and drawings. This supreme guide to occultist history, lore, magick, and ceremony is split into two parts: The first is entitled ""The Literature of Ceremonial Magic."" Here, Waite examines the ritualistic traditions which surrounding the occult movement for centuries. He notes various texts, and how these had a bearing upon the practice of the occult and of magical ceremony. The second part, ""The Complete Grimoire,"" concerns how those who practice black magic and occult ritual become versed in the craft. The stringent physical and mental requirements, and the need to practice a spiritual attunement and inner ablution, is detailed. Astronomical knowledge of the planets and their movements is a necessity, as is possession of a variety of instruments, plus a deep knowledge of the various symbols and scripts used in occultism.

In this powerful book, the renowned exorcist of Rome tells of his many experiences in his ministry as an exorcist doing battle with Satan to relieve the great suffering of people in the grip of evil. The importance of the ministry to "expel demons" is clearly seen in the Gospels, from the actions of the Apostles, and from Church history. Fr. Amorth allows the reader to witness the activities of the exorcist, to experience what an exorcist sees and does. He also reveals how little modern science, psychology, and medicine can do to help those under Satan's influence, and that only the power of Christ can release them from this kind of mental, spiritual or physical suffering. An Exorcist Tells His Story has been a European best-seller that has gone through numerous printings and editions. No other book today so thoroughly and concisely discusses the topic of exorcism.

This introduction to Gnosis by Christoph Markschies combines great clarity with immense learning.In his Introduction Markschies defines the term Gnosis and its relationship to 'Gnosticism', indicating why Gnosis is preferable and sketches out the main problems. He then treats the sources, both those in the church fathers and heresiologists, and the more recent Nag Hammadi finds. He goes on to discuss early forms of 'Gnosis' in antiquity, Jewish and Christian (New Testament) and the early Gnostics; the main representatives of Gnosis, especially Valentinus and Marcion; Manichaeism as the culmination and end-point of Gnosis; ancient communities of 'Gnostics'; and finally 'Gnosis' in antiquity and the present.There is a useful chronological table and an excellent select bibliography.

Original and comprehensive, "Magic in the Ancient Greek World "takes the reader inside both the social imagination and the ritual reality that made magic possible in ancient Greece.
Explores the widespread use of spells, drugs, curse tablets, and figurines, and the practitioners of magic in the ancient world
Uncovers how magic worked. Was it down to mere superstition? Did the subject need to believe in order for it to have an effect?
Focuses on detailed case studies of individual types of magic
Examines the central role of magic in Greek life

Investigating the impact of Arabic medieval astrological and magical theories on early modern occult philosophy, this book argues that they provided a naturalistic explanation of astral influences and magical efficacy based on Aristotelian notions of causality.

In its day, spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to seance tables and trance lectures. It has alternately been ridiculed as the apogee of fatuous credulity and hailed as a feminist movement. Its tricks have been exposed, its charlatans unmasked, and its heroes' names lost to posterity. In its day, however, its leaders were household names and politicians worried about capturing the Spiritualist vote. Cathy Gutierrez places Spiritualism in the context of the 19th-century American Renaissance. Although this epithet usually signifies the sudden blossoming of American letters, Gutierrez points to its original meaning: a cultural imagination enraptured with the past and the classics in particular, accompanied by a cultural efflorescence. Spiritualism, she contends, was the religious articulation of the American Renaissance, and the ramifications of looking backward for advice about the present were far-reaching. The Spiritualist movement, says Gutierrez, was a 'renaissance of the Renaissance, ' a culture in love with history as much as it trumpeted progress and futurity, and an expression of what constituted religious hope among burgeoning technology and colonialism. Rejecting Christian ideas about salvation, Spiritualists embraced Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas. Humans were shot through with the divine, rather than seen as helpless and inexorably corrupt sinners in the hands of a transcendent, angry God. Gutierrez's study of this fascinating and important movement is organized thematically. She analyzes Spiritualist conceptions of memory, marriage, medicine, and minds, explores such phenomena as machines for contacting the dead, spirit-photography, the idea of eternal spiritual affinity (which implied the necessity for marriage reform), the connection between health and spirituality, and mesmerism."

Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. In this volume, Jean La Fontaine explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. The chapters touch on public scares about devil-worship, misconceptions about human sacrifice and the use of body parts in healing practices, and mistaken accusations of children practicing witchcraft. Together, these cases demonstrate that comparison is a powerful method of cultural understanding, but warns of the dangers and mistaken conclusions that untrained ideas about other ways of life can lead to.

Wangerin examines one small symbolic revolution against American capitalist culture. It was carried out by youth who were painfully and personally aware of the problems of what they called the System, though they did not necessarily understand the underlying causes of their problems. They called themselves the Children of God. Wangerin studied the Children of God from 1973-1978 in the United States, Mexico, and Italy and has kept in touch with some of them ever since. This is one of the most thorough studies of the controversial cult founded in 1968 by David Berg, and the only ethnography that treats it as a mystical utopian socialist movement.