The bond between humans and horses is deep. For humans, horses provide freedom. Riding on horses and horse-drawn chariots or carts has allowed humans to go farther and faster than they could on their own. Horses (now high-horsepower cars) are our wings. As a result, their images show up in our dreams and our personal and cultural stories as symbols not only of freedom, but of power, swiftness, nobility, and beauty. Equine images empower us to ride on inner journeys, explore the mysteries of the soul, and carry the human spirit forward. In bringing to life the horse tales of many cultures throughout the ages, Riding on Horses' Wings is as whimsical and magical as it is inspiring. From the white-winged Pegasus and part-human Centaurs in ancient Greek myths, Epona in ancient Celtic lore, the eight-legged Sleipnir in Nordic tales, and Kanthaka in Buddhist lore, to the many horses in Native American mythologies and today's literary and fine arts, movies, YouTube videos, and beyond, horses touch our hearts and elevate our imaginations. In this book, Janet Bubar Rich taps into our love of horses and horse tales, inspiring us all to take life by the reins, make the changes needed to improve our lives, and create sustainable futures for horses, humans, and other species on earth, our home.

An alarming number of Christians have been fed the

notion that our God is a mean and angry god. Nothing

could be further from the truth. In fact, Larry Huch suggests

that God's eyes are constantly searching "to and fro

throughout the whole earth" (2 Chronicles 16:9), looking

for someone to heal, someone to bless, someone to prosper,

and someone to favor.

In his new book, Unveiling Ancient Biblical Secrets, Huch

reveals God's ancient blessings for your life, such as:

the hundredfold breakthrough in the parable of the seed

the secret of prayer revealed in Jacob's ladder

the protective power of the mezuzah

Purim's miracle for turning your life story around

biblical faith for the last days

God's covenant of success

God's power multiplied in your life with the four cups of

Communion

By understanding and tapping into these timeless truths in

the Torah, Christians can rediscover the destiny that God

intends for His people. We were not meant to live lives

of empty religious ritua

The Shabbat Evening Siddur is the first siddur designed specifically for synagogues, minyanim and families striving for authenticity, sincerity and creativity in their traditional Friday night davening. Color photographs, a precise translation and inspiring commentary by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, a special study section, and an innovative graphic layout bring out the beauty, convey the power, and enrich the experience of welcoming Shabbat.

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies innovatively combines the ways in which scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, religious studies, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics have integrated the study of Sikhism within a wide range of critical and postcolonial perspectives on the nature of religion, violence, gender, ethno-nationalism, and revisionist historiography. A number of essays within this collection also provide a more practical dimension, written by artists and practitioners of the tradition. The handbook is divided into eight thematic sections that explore different 'expressions' of Sikhism. Historical, literary, ideological, institutional, and artistic expressions are considered in turn, followed by discussion of Sikhs in the Diaspora, and of caste and gender in the Panth. Each section begins with an essay by a prominent scholar in the field, providing an overview of the topic. Further essays provide detail and further treat the fluid, multivocal nature of both the Sikh past and the present. The handbook concludes with a section considering future directions in Sikh Studies.

The Festival of Pirs is an ethnographic study of the religious life of the village of Gugudu in Andhra Pradesh. It focuses on the public event of Muharram, which is practiced by urban Shi'i communities across South Asia, but takes on a strikingly different color in Gugudu because of the central place of a local pir, or saint, called Kullayappa. The story of Kullayappa is pivotal in Gugudu's religious culture, effectively displacing the better-known story of Imam Hussain from Shi'a Islam, and each year 300,000 pilgrims from across South India visit this remote village to express their devotion to Kullayappa. As with many villages in South India, Gugudu is mostly populated by non-Muslims, yet Muslim rituals and practices play a crucial role in its devotion. In the words of one devotee, "There is no Hindu or Muslim. They all have one religion, which is called 'Kullayappa devotion (bhakti).'" Afsar Mohammad explores how the diverse religious life in the village of Gugudu expands our notions of devotion to the martyrs of Karbala, not only in this particular village but also in the wider world.

In Making Things Better, A. David Napier demonstrates how anthropological description of non-Western exchange practices and beliefs can be a tonic for contemporary economic systems in which our impersonal relationship to ''things'' transforms the animate elements of social life into inanimate sets of commodities. Such a fundamental transformation, Napier suggests, makes us automatons in globally integrated social circuits that generate a cast of a winners and losers engaged in hostile competition for wealth and power. Our impersonal relations to ''things''-and to people as well-are so ingrained in our being, we take them for granted as we sleepwalk through routine life. Like the surrealist artists of the 1920s who, through their art, poetry, films, and photography, fought a valiant battle against mind-numbing conformity, Napier provides exercises and practica designed to shock the reader from their wakeful sleep. These demonstrate powerfully the positively integrative social effects of more socially entangled, non-Western orientations to ''things'' and to ''people.'' His arguments also have implications for the rights and legal status of indigenous peoples, which are drawn out in the course of the book.

Feeding the Dead outlines the early history of ancestor worship in South Asia, from the earliest sources available, the Vedas, up to the descriptions found in the Dharmshastra tradition. Most prior works on ancestor worship have done little to address the question of how shraddha, the paradigmatic ritual of ancestor worship up to the present day, came to be. Matthew R. Sayers argues that the development of shraddha is central to understanding the shift from Vedic to Classical Hindu modes of religious behavior. Central to this transition is the discursive construction of the role of the religious expert in mediating between the divine and the human actor. Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions draw upon popular religious practices to construct a new tradition. Sayers argues that the definition of a religious expert that informs religiosity in the Common Era is grounded in the redefinition of ancestral rites in the Grhyasutras. Beyond making more clear the much misunderstood history of ancestor worship in India, this book addressing the serious question about how and why religion in India changed so radically in the last half of the first millennium BCE. The redefinition of the role of religious expert is hugely significant for understanding that change. This book ties together the oldest ritual texts with the customs of ancestor worship that underlie and inform medieval and contemporary practice.

Bardwell L. Smith offers a fresh perspective on mizuko kuyo, the Japanese ceremony performed to bring solace to those who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. Showing how old and new forms of myth, symbol, doctrine, praxis, and organization combine and overlap in contemporary mizuko kuyo, Smith provides critical insight from many angles: the sociology of the family, the power of the medical profession, the economics of temples, the import of ancestral connections, the need for healing in both private and communal ways and, perhaps above all, the place of women in modern Japanese religion. At the heart of Smith's research is the issue of how human beings experience the death of a life that has been and remains precious to them. While universal, these losses are also personal and unique. The role of society in helping people to heal from these experiences varies widely and has changed enormously in recent decades. In examples of grieving for these kinds of losses one finds narratives not only of deep sorrow but of remarkable dignity.

This is a book about religious conceptions of trees within the cultural world of tree worship at the tree shrines of northern India. Sacred trees have been worshipped for millennia in India and today tree worship continues there among all segments of society. In the past, tree worship was regarded by many Western anthropologists and scholars of religion as a prime example of childish animism or decadent ''popular religion.'' More recently this aspect of world religious cultures is almost completely ignored in the theoretical concerns of the day. David Haberman hopes to demonstrate that by seriously investigating the world of Indian tree worship, we can learn much about not only this prominent feature of the landscape of South Asian religion, but also something about the cultural construction of nature as well as religion overall. The title People Trees relates to the content of this book in at least six ways. First, although other sacred trees are examined, the pipal-arguably the most sacred tree in India-receives the greatest attention in this study. The Hindi word ''pipal'' is pronounced similarly to the English word ''people.''Second, the ''personhood'' of trees is a commonly accepted notion in India. Haberman was often told: ''This tree is a person just like you and me.'' Third, this is not a study of isolated trees in some remote wilderness area, but rather a study of trees in densely populated urban environments. This is a study of trees who live with people and people who live with trees. Fourth, the trees examined in this book have been planted and nurtured by people for many centuries. They seem to have benefited from human cultivation and flourished in environments managed by humans. Fifth, the book involves an examination of the human experience of trees, of the relationship between people and trees. Haberman is interested in people's sense of trees. And finally, the trees located in the neighborhood tree shrines of northern India are not controlled by a professional or elite class of priests. Common people have direct access to them and are free to worship them in their own way. They are part of the people's religion. Haberman hopes that this book will help readers expand their sense of the possible relationships that exist between humans and trees. By broadening our understanding of this relationship, he says, we may begin to think differently of the value of trees and the impact of deforestation and other human threats to trees.

More than a series of rites of passage through the landmarks of growing up and growing old, Jewish and Christian life-cycle rituals give the members of each religious tradition theological and ritualized definitions of what a life should be. In this volume, the fourth in the acclaimed series "Two Liturgical Traditions", eight scholars explore the models of human life implicit in Judaism and Christianity by unraveling and exploring the evolution and current condition of their life-cycle liturgies. The essays presented here emphasize the wholeness of a life as illustrated by the religious metaphors inherent in life-cycle rites. The contributors examine the history and shape of each life-cycle rite - including the rituals and practices associated with birth, adolescence, marriage, sickness, and death - and analyze the theological message that each rite represents.

The study of pilgrimage often centres itself around miracles and spontaneous populist activities. While some of these activities and stories may play an important role in the emergence of potential pilgrimage sites and in helping create wider interest in them, this book demonstrates that the dynamics of the marketplace, including marketing and promotional activities by priests and secular interest groups, create the very consumerist markets through which pilgrimages become established and successful - and through which the 'sacred' as a category can be sustained. By drawing on examples from several contexts, including Japan, India, China, Vietnam, Europe, and the Muslim world, author Ian Reader evaluates how pilgrimages may be invented, shaped, and promoted by various interest groups. In so doing he draws attention to the competitive nature of the pilgrimage market, revealing that there are rivalries, borrowed ideas, and alliances with commercial and civil agencies to promote pilgrimages. The importance of consumerism is demonstrated, both in terms of consumer goods/souvenirs and pilgrimage site selection, rather than the usual depictions of consumerism as tawdry disjunctions on the 'sacred.' As such this book reorients studies of pilgrimage by highlighting not just the pilgrims who so often dominate the literature, but also the various other interest groups and agencies without whom pilgrimage as a phenomenon would not exist.

How can we order the world while accepting its enduring ambiguities? Rethinking Pluralism suggests a new approach to the problem of ambiguity and social order, which goes beyond the default modern position of 'notation' (resort to rules and categories to disambiguate). The book argues that alternative, more particularistic modes of dealing with ambiguity through ritual and shared experience better attune to contemporary problems of living with difference. It retrieves key aspects of earlier discussions of ambiguity evident in rabbinic commentaries, Chinese texts, and Greek philosophical and dramatic works, and applies those texts to modern problems. The book is a work of recuperation that challenges contemporary constructions of tradition and modernity. In this, it draws on the tradition of pragmatism in American philosophy, especially John Dewey's injunctions to heed the particular, the contingent and experienced as opposed to the abstract, general and disembodied. Only in this way can new forms of empathy emerge congruent with the deeply plural nature of our present experience. While we cannot avoid the ambiguities inherent to the categories through which we construct our world, the book urges us to reconceptualize the ways in which we think about boundaries - not just the solid line of notation, but also the permeable membrane of ritualization and the fractal complexity of shared experience.

Walter E. A. van Beek draws on over four decades of extensive fieldwork to offer an in-depth study of the religion of the Kapsiki/Higi, who live in the Mandara Mountains on the border between North Cameroon and Northeast Nigeria. Concentrating on ritual as the core of traditional religion, van Beek shows how Kapsiki/Higi practices have endured through the long and turbulent history of the region. Kapsiki rituals reveal a focus on two fundamental concepts: dwelling and belonging. Van Beek examines their sacrificial practices, through which the Kapsiki show a complex and pervasive connection with the Mandara Mountains, as well as the character of their relationships among themselves and with outsiders. Van Beek also explores their rituals of belonging, rites of passage which take place from birth through initiation and marriage - and even death, with the tradition of the ''dancing dead,'' when a fully decorated corpse on the shoulders of a smith ''dances'' with his mourning kinsmen. The Dancing Dead is the result of the author's lifelong study of the Kapsiki/Higi. It gives a unique description of the rituals in an African traditional religion based not upon ancestors, but on a completely relational thought system, where in the end all rituals are integrated into one major cycle.

Your young students will join Daniel and his Israeli cousin Rivkah as they learn together about the Jewish holidays.

Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's peoples-the world's social majority-quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature-she is, in the final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the ''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

"It's a nice piece of pageantry. . . . Rationally it's lunatic, but in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think."--HRH Prince Philip, Duke of EdinburghFounded by Edward III in 1348, the Most Noble Order of the Garter is the highest chivalric honor among the gifts of the Queen of England and an institution that looks proudly back to its medieval origins. But what does the annual Garter procession of modern princes and politicians decked out in velvets and silks have to do with fourteenth-century institutions? And did the Order, in any event, actually originate in the wardrobe malfunction of the traditional story, when Edward held up his mistress's dropped garter for all to see and declared it to be a mark of honor rather than shame? Or is this tale of the Order's beginning nothing more than a vulgar myth?With steady erudition and not infrequent irreverence, Stephanie Trigg ranges from medieval romance to Victorian caricature, from imperial politics to medievalism in contemporary culture, to write a strikingly original cultural history of the Order of the Garter. She explores the Order's attempts to reform and modernize itself, even as it holds onto an ambivalent relationship to its medieval past. She revisits those moments in British history when the Garter has taken on new or increased importance and explores a long tradition of amusement and embarrassment over its formal processions and elaborate costumes. Revisiting the myth of the dropped garter itself, she asks what it can tell us about our desire to seek the hidden sexual history behind so venerable an institution.Grounded in archival detail and combining historical method with reception and cultural studies, "Shame and Honor" untangles 650 years of fact, fiction, ritual, and reinvention.

The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton (1821 90) was a colourful and often controversial character. A talented linguist and keen ethnologist, he worked in India during the 1840s as an interpreter and intelligence officer for General Sir Charles Napier, and published several books about his experiences in 1851 2. He first gained celebrity, however, for his adventurous 1853 trip to Mecca, under the disguise of a pilgrim, which is described in this lively three-volume publication (1855 6). Few Europeans had ever visited the Muslim holy places; one of them was John Lewis Burckhardt, whose 1829 account is also reissued in this series. Volume 2 of Burton's book vividly describes the heat and dangers of the journey to Medina, the behaviour and conversation of the pilgrims from many different tribes and nations, and the mosques, tombs and other sights of the bustling city, complete with traders and beggars.