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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > General
The dark side of the dark side ...He has everything he should want
in life. A good job. A nice home. A nice car. A beautiful wife and
family. A retirement plan. An active social life. A prestigious
reputation. Envious neighbours. A pet dog. Yet there remains
emptiness inside. In a search for meaning, he begins a journey from
which he cannot return. Grasping at everything he can, experiments
in ritual magick lead him into the realms of sex, drugs, organised
crime, aliens and angels as his life spirals further and further up
and down the paths of initiation and illumination while grappling
with insanity, annihilation and transformation.
This book is based on the author's ten-year research into the
politics of belief surrounding paranormal ideas. Through a detailed
examination of the participants, issues, strategies and underlying
factors that constitute the contemporary paranormal debate, the
book explores the struggle surrounding the status of paranormal
phenomena. It examines, on the one hand, how the principal arbiters
of religious and scientific truths - the Church and the academic
establishment - reject paranormal ideas as 'occult' and
'pseudo-scientific', and how, on the other hand, paranormal
enthusiasts attempt to resist such labels and instead establish
paranormal ideas as legitimate knowledge. The author contends that
the paranormal debate is the outcome of wider discursive processes
that are concerned with the construction and negotiation of truth
in Western society generally. More specifically, the debate is seen
as an aspect of the "boundary work" that defines the contours of
religious and scientific orthodoxy. The book paves new ground in
understanding the nature of belief relating to a topic that has
long held fascination to academics and lay people alike -
paranormal ideas. It develops a discursive framework for
understanding a contemporary social phenomenon, hence placing the
study at the cutting edge of ethnographic development that seeks to
integrate discursive perspectives with empirical accounts of
sociological phenomena. Most importantly, the study is intended to
contribute to the debate surrounding communicative action, by
outlining a discursive perspective on the negotiation of ideational
differences that goes beyond the incommensurability theories that
have dominated the sociology of communication and knowledge.
Based on twenty-seven years of original archival research,
including the discovery of previously unknown documents, this
day-by-day narrative of the hysteria that swept through Salem
Village in 1692 and 1693 reveals new connections behind the events,
and shows how rapidly a community can descend into bloodthirsty
madness. Roach opens her work with chapters on the history of the
Puritan colonies of New England, and explains how these people
regarded the metaphysical and the supernatural. The account of the
days from January 1692 to March 1693 keeps in order the large cast
of characters, places events in their correct contexts, and
occasionally contradicts earlier assumptions about the gruesome
events. The last chapter discusses the remarkable impact of the
events, pointing out how the 300th anniversary of the trials made
headlines in Japan and Australia.
"Avery Gordon's stunningly original and provocatively imaginative
book explores the connections linking horror, history, and
haunting." --George Lipsitz
"The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining
to the fantastic and the uncanny." --American Studies
International"
"Ghostly Matters" immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader
among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all
fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual
brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they
first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of
us can remember to find a more important book." --Charles Lemert
Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni
Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches"), Avery Gordon
demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present
life in different and more complicated ways than most social
analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject,
Ghostly Matters" has advanced the way we look at the complex
intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives
in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.
Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.
Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.
The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is an
authoritative new reference and interpretive volume detailing the
origins, development, and influence of one of the richest aspects
of Russian cultural and intellectual life - its religious ideas.
After setting the historical background and context, the Handbook
follows the leading figures and movements in modern Russian
religious thought through a period of immense historical upheavals,
including seventy years of officially atheist communist rule and
the growth of an exiled diaspora with, e.g., its journal The Way.
Therefore the shape of Russian religious thought cannot be
separated from long-running debates with nihilism and atheism.
Important thinkers such as Losev and Bakhtin had to guard their
words in an environment of religious persecution, whilst some views
were shaped by prison experiences. Before the Soviet period,
Russian national identity was closely linked with religion -
linkages which again are being forged in the new Russia. Relevant
in this connection are complex relationships with Judaism. In
addition to religious thinkers such as Philaret, Chaadaev,
Khomiakov, Kireevsky, Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev,
Shestov, Frank, Karsavin, and Alexander Men, the Handbook also
looks at the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art,
film, and the novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Ideas,
institutions, and movements discussed include the Church academies,
Slavophilism and Westernism, theosis, the name-glorifying
(imiaslavie) controversy, the God-seekers and God-builders, Russian
religious idealism and liberalism, and the Neopatristic school.
Occultism is considered, as is the role of tradition and the
influence of Russian religious thought in the West.
If you want to know how hypnosis really works (and, no, it has
nothing to do with waving of hands or other similar nonsense), you
will want to read this book. If you want to know the "magic" behind
Ericksonian techniques and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, you have
to read this book. From one of the true masters of hypnotherapy,
this is one book that can really change your life!!
What do the occult sciences, seances with the souls of the dead,
and appeals to saintly powers have to do with rationality? Since
the late nineteenth century, modernizing intellectuals, religious
leaders, and statesmen in Iran have attempted to curtail many such
practices as "superstitious," instead encouraging the development
of rational religious sensibilities and dispositions. However, far
from diminishing the diverse methods through which Iranians engage
with the immaterial realm, these rationalizing processes have
multiplied the possibilities for metaphysical experimentation. The
Iranian Metaphysicals examines these experiments and their
transformations over the past century. Drawing on years of
ethnographic and archival research, Alireza Doostdar shows that
metaphysical experimentation lies at the center of some of the most
influential intellectual and religious movements in modern Iran.
These forms of exploration have not only produced a plurality of
rational orientations toward metaphysical phenomena but have also
fundamentally shaped what is understood as orthodox Shi'i Islam,
including the forms of Islamic rationality at the heart of projects
for building and sustaining an Islamic Republic. Delving into
frequently neglected aspects of Iranian spirituality, politics, and
intellectual inquiry, The Iranian Metaphysicals challenges widely
held assumptions about Islam, rationality, and the relationship
between science and religion.
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