New Age culture is generally regarded as a modern manifestation of Western millenarianism - a concept built around the expectation of an imminent historical crisis followed by the inauguration of a golden age which occupies a key place in the history of Western ideas. The New Age in the Modern West argues that New Age culture is part of a family of ideas, including utopianism, which construct alternative futures and drive revolutionary change. Nicholas Campion traces New Age ideas back to ancient cosmology, and questions the concepts of the Enlightenment and the theory of progress. He considers the contributions of the key figures of the 18th century, the legacy of the astronomer Isaac Newton and the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, as well as the theosophist, H.P. Blavatsky, the psychologist, C.G. Jung, and the writer and artist, Jose Arguelles. He also pays particular attention to the beat writers of the 1950s, the counterculture of the 1960s, concepts of the Aquarian Age and prophecies of the end of the Maya Calendar in 2012. Lastly he examines neoconservatism as both a reaction against the 1960s and as a utopian phenomenon. The New Age in the Modern West is an important book for anyone interested in countercultural and revolutionary ideas in the modern West.

Falsidade e composto por cartas - ou capitulos - supostamente enviadas a um amigo. Diversos temas sao abordados a cada capitulo, desde alguns dos pecados capitais ate uma critica a crenca em Deus. Descrenca total sobre a vida e a humanidade permeia Falsidade, um livro sobrio. E nao ha sequer uma sentenca que enalteca o ser humano. A cada paragrafo, ser canalha e vil e o conselho dado aos leitores. Com sentencas fortes e palavras morbidamente bem escolhidas, RSCalvino aventura-se a falar sobre verdades profundas e sombrias da alma humana. Talvez verdades ja ditas por cada leitor, mas sorrateiramente encobertas por uma hipocrisia social ou, pior, por uma inconsciencia do proprio existir. Este livro sera dito como um dos mais odiados livros escritos pela humanidade, justamente por espelhar de forma crua e clara, com todas as palavras, as deformidades do espirito humano. Alguns poucos de seus amigos por vezes temem em dizer que o trabalho e fruto da influencia da Sociedade a qual tivera contato atraves de um amigo. Sem duvidas o livro mais odioso de todos os tempos

Existiert Gott? Gibt es einen Gott, so wie er in der Bibel und von christlichen Religionen dargestellt wird? Fragen sind eine ausgezeichnete Hilfe, um Anworten zu finden.

Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets provides an ethnographic study of varmakkalai, or "the art of the vital spots," a South Indian esoteric tradition that combines medical practice and martial arts. Although siddha medicine is officially part of the Indian Government's medically pluralistic health-care system, very little of a reliable nature has been written about it. Drawing on a diverse array of materials, including Tamil manuscripts, interviews with practitioners, and his own personal experience as an apprentice, Sieler traces the practices of varmakkalai both in different religious traditions-such as Yoga and Ayurveda-and within various combat practices. His argument is based on in-depth ethnographic research in the southernmost region of India, where hereditary medico-martial practitioners learn their occupation from relatives or skilled gurus through an esoteric, spiritual education system. Rituals of secrecy and apprenticeship in varmakkalai are among the important focal points of Sieler's study. Practitioners protect their esoteric knowledge, but they also engage in a kind of "lure and withdrawal"--a performance of secrecy--because secrecy functions as what might be called "symbolic capital." Sieler argues that varmakkalai is, above all, a matter of texts in practice; knowledge transmission between teacher and student conveys tacit, non-verbal knowledge, and constitutes a "moral economy." It is not merely plain facts that are communicated, but also moral obligations, ethical conduct and tacit, bodily knowledge. Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to students of religion, medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, indologists, and martial arts and performance studies.

Estos escritos, hallados en Nag Hammadi, Egipto, en 1945, ademas de contar la verdadera historia del Grial, hablan del ministerio de Cristo en terminos muy humanos. De acuerdo con estos textos, Jesus vino al mundo a senalar la senda para encontrar el camino del conocimiento (de ahi la palabra gnosis). Esta serie de evangelios nos muestra que las raices del gnosticismo se caracterizan por ser una mezcla de las creencias estrictamente cristianas con creencias judaicas y orientales, cuya pretension es alcanzar el conocimiento de lo divino por medio de la intuicion.

Alberto Korda's famous photograph of Che Guevara titled the "Guerrillero Heroico" has been reproduced, modified and remixed countless times since it was taken on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba. This book looks again at this well-known mass-produced image to explore how an image can take on cultural force in diverse parts of the globe and legitimate varying positions and mass action in unexpected global political contexts. Analytically, the book develops a comparative analysis of how images become attached to a range of meanings that are absolutely inseparable from their contexts of use. Addressing the need for a fluid and responsive approach to the study of visual meaning-making, this book relies on multiple methodologies such as semiotics, research-creation, multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography and phenomenology and shows how each method has something to offer toward the understanding of the social and cultural work of images in our globally oriented cultures.

Alain F. Corcos was raised by a family of nonbelievers. When he grew up and pursued a career in science, he encountered nothing to challenge his lack of faith. In fact, he would have considered his atheism completely unremarkable if not for the reactions he confronted again and again: - How can you be moral when you don't believe in God?
- If you know you can't prove God doesn't exist, doesn't that make you agnostic?
- Aren't you afraid of death?

In "Atheism, Science, and Me," Dr. Corcos reminisces about satisfying his thirst for knowledge through research rather than religious doctrine or philosophy. While he has no interest in "converting" anybody to atheism, the good-natured enthusiasm with which he presents his worldview conveys the joys of a life unencumbered by religion.

ALAIN F. CORCOS is a retired professor of botany. His previous books are "Mendel, Genes and You; Race and Difference Among Us"; "Biological Experiments and Ideas";" Race and You"; "Gregor Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybrids: A Guided Study (with Floyd V. Monaghan)"; "The Myth of Human Races"; "Four Short True Stories of a French Family"; "The Myth of the Jewish Race: A Biologist's Point of View"; "The Little Yellow Train: Survival and Escape from Nazi France (June 1940-March 1944)"; and "Who Is a Jew? Thoughts of a Biologist: An Essay Dedicated to the Jewish and Non-Jewish Victims of the Nazi Holocaust."

Atheism's leading lights have long been intellectuals raised in the secular and academic worlds: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. By contrast, Jerry DeWitt was born and bred into the church and was in fact a Pentecostal preacher before arriving at atheism through an extraordinary dialogue with faith that spanned more than a quarter of a century. "Hope After Faith" is his account of that journey.
DeWitt was a pastor in the town of DeRidder, Louisiana, and was a fixture of the community. In private, however, he'd begun to question his faith. Late one night in May 2011, a member of his flock called seeking prayer for her brother who had been in a serious accident. As DeWitt searched for the right words to console her, speech failed him, and he found that the faith which once had formed the cornerstone of his life had finally crumbled to dust. When it became public knowledge that DeWitt was now an atheist, he found himself shunned by much of DeRidder's highly religious community, losing nearly everything he'd known.
DeWitt's struggle for identity and meaning mirrors the one currently facing millions of people around the world. With both agnosticism and atheism entering the mainstream--one in five Americans now claim no religious affiliation, according to a recent study--the moment has arrived for a new atheist voice, one that is respectful of faith and religious traditions yet warmly embraces a life free of religion, finding not skepticism and cold doubt but rather profound meaning and hope. "Hope After Faith" is the story of one man's evolution toward a committed and considered atheism, one driven by humanism, a profound moral dimension, and a happiness and self-confidence obtained through living free of fear.

For the early Christians, "pagan" referred to a multitude of unbelievers: Greek and Roman devotees of the Olympian gods, and "barbarians" such as Arabs and Germans with their own array of deities. But while these groups were clearly outsiders or idolaters, who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Pagan and Christian" uncovers the ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.

While the emperor Constantine's conversion in 312 was a momentous event in the history of Christianity, the new religion had been gradually forming in the Roman Empire for centuries, as it moved away from its Jewish origins and adapted to the dominant pagan culture. Early Christians drew on pagan practices and claimed important pagans as their harbingers--asserting that Plato, Virgil, and others had glimpsed Christian truths. At the same time, Greeks and Romans had encountered in Judaism observances and beliefs shared by Christians such as the Sabbath and the idea of a single, creator God. Polytheism was the most obvious feature separating paganism and Christianity, but pagans could be monotheists, and Christians could be accused of polytheism and branded as pagans. In the diverse religious communities of the Roman Empire, as Jones makes clear, concepts of divinity, conversion, sacrifice, and prayer were much more fluid than traditional accounts of early Christianity have led us to believe.