Apostolizitat und Einheit sind zentrale Themen der OEkumene. Epheserbrief-Textanalyse und grundliche Untersuchung des Zustandes der damaligen Kirche versuchen Integrationsfahigkeit in der gespalteten Kirche zu finden. Geschichte, Entwicklung und heutige Situation der Thomaschristenheit werden selbstkritisch dargestellt. Der Beitrag des Vatikanum II gilt als Chance und Wendepunkt fur die Orientalischen Kirchen und lasst Perspektiven fur eine moegliche Zukunft erkennen.

Dr. Francis Israel Regardie was one of the most important figures in the 20th centure development of the Western Mystery Tradition. From the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, the Bhagavad-Gita, Buddhism, and yoga he came to study with Crowley and became his secretary.

The Blue Cliff Record is a translation of the Pi Yen Lu, a collection of one hundred Zen koans - the paradoxical teaching stories used by Zen teachers to go beneath rational thought - accompanied by commentaries and appreciatory verses from the teachings of the Chinese Zen masters. Compiled in the twelfth century, by the great Zen master and poet Hseh-tou Ch'ung-hsien it is considered to be one of the greatest treasures of Zen literature and an essential study manual for students of Zen.

In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent-as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, something solid. His theology understood the world itself, with its manifold inhabitants-from gods to humans to insects down to the merest rock-as part of the unfolding of a single conscious reality, Siva. This conscious singularity-the word "god" here does not quite do it justice-with its capacity to choose and will, pervades all through, top to bottom; as Abhinavagupta writes, "even down to a worm - when they do their own deeds, that which is to be done first stirs in the heart." His panentheism proposed an answer to a familiar conundrum, one we still grapple with today: Consciousness is so unlike matter. How does consciousness actually connect to the materiality of our world? To put this in more familar twenty-first-century terms, how does mind connect to body? These questions drive Loriliai Biernacki's The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and New Materialism. Biernacki draws on Abhinavagupta's thought-and particularly his yet-untranslated, philosophical magnum opus, the Isvara Pratyabhijna Vivrti Vimarsini-to think through contemporary issues such as the looming prospect of machine AI, ideas about information, and our ecological crises. She argues that Abhinavagupta's panentheism can help us understand our current world and can contribute to a New Materialist re-envisioning of the relationship that humans have with matter.

The Otherworld is ready for you, but are you ready for the Otherworld? What would you tell your own less-experienced self about magic if you could go back in time and make a better start? That is the question this book seeks to address. What might you need to slough off, how far might you need to walk from the comfortable and familiar to truly embrace a magical life? Covering a period of thirteen moons, Standing and Not Falling is a workbook that allows the reader to clear the way before embarking, or to conduct a spiritual detox on themselves before stepping up their practice, or engaging a new beginning. Suitable for practitioners of any type of sorcerous activity from witchcraft to ceremonial magic and beyond. This book takes steady, direct aim at the main causes of disfunction and difficulty that arise for practitioners of the art magical, both individually and in relation to others, and at times also at the key maladies of our age.

This volume investigates "alternative" spiritualities that increasingly cater for the mainstream within the secularized society of Norway, making Norwegian-based research available to international scholarship. It looks at New Age both in a restricted (sensu stricto) and a wide sense (sensu lato), focusing mainly on the period from the mid-1990s and onwards, with a particular emphasis on developments after the turn of the century. Few, if any, of the ideas and practices discussed in this book are homegrown or uniquely Norwegian, but local soil and climate still matters, as habitats for particular growths and developments. Globalizing currents are here shaped and molded by local religious history and contemporary religio-political systems, along with random incidences, such as the setting up of an angel-business by the princess Martha Louise. The position of Lutheran Protestantism as "national religion" particularly impacts on the development and perception of religious competitors.

Covers the history, founders, beliefs, and literature of over five hundred nonconventional and alternative religious movements.

In Europe and North and South America during the early modern period, people believed that their dreams might be, variously, messages from God, the machinations of demons, visits from the dead, or visions of the future. Interpreting their dreams in much the same ways as their ancient and medieval forebears had done-and often using the dream-guides their predecessors had written-dreamers rejoiced in heralds of good fortune and consulted physicians, clerics, or practitioners of magic when their visions waxed ominous. Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions traces the role of dreams and related visionary experiences in the cultures within the Atlantic world from the late thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries, examining an era of cultural encounters and transitions through this unique lens. In the wake of Reformation-era battles over religious authority and colonial expansion into Asia, Africa, and the Americas, questions about truth and knowledge became particularly urgent and debate over the meaning and reliability of dreams became all the more relevant. Exploring both indigenous and European methods of understanding dream phenomena, this volume argues that visions were central to struggles over spiritual and political authority. Featuring eleven original essays, Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions explores the ways in which reports and interpretations of dreams played a significant role in reflecting cultural shifts and structuring historic change. Contributors: Emma Anderson, Mary Baine Campbell, Luis Corteguera, Matthew Dennis, Carla Gerona, Maria V Jordan, Luis Filipe Silverio Lima, Phyllis Mack, Ann Marie Plane, Andrew Redden, Janine Riviere, Leslie Tuttle, Anthony F. C. Wallace.

Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical-that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and-with striking regularity-monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism "monstrous"-at once repellent and seductive-is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources-medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms-Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.

This is the first survey of religious beliefs in the British Isles from the Old Stone Age to the coming of Christianity, one of the least familiar periods in Britaina s history. Ronald Hutton draws upon a wealth of new data, much of it archaeological, that has transformed interpretation over the past decade. Giving more or less equal weight to all periods, from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, he examines a fascinating range of evidence for Celtic and Romano--British paganism, from burial sites, cairns, megaliths and causeways, to carvings, figurines, jewellery, weapons, votive objects, literary texts and folklore.