From the bestselling author of Practical Magic comes an inspiring, illustrated collection of magical celebrations of nature from around the world-with rituals for incorporating them into your own practice. Nature is what gives us life-it is the source of all magic and power in the world. That is something that humans have understood since the beginning of time, and it is a constant among cultures around the world. However, the ways in which we celebrate it can vary wildly. Bulgarian Baba Marta Day welcomes the arrival of Spring with Martenitsas, little talismans of red and white string, while in Southeast Asia, that same yearly event is celebrated during Holi, a joyful, riotous dance of colors. Yalda, Soyal, Saturnalia, Dong Zhi, and St.Lucia's Day (from Iran, Arizona, Ancient Rome, China, and Scandinavia) are all very different-but they all honor the Winter Solstice. Each of these celebrations is a ritual, a form of magic created by community and tradition. And while their differences can help us understand their various cultural identities, their similarities can create a bond that reaches across space and time. In this beautifully illustrated book from bestselling magical author Nikki Van De Car readers will learn the history and meaning behind 40 of these ritual celebrations, organized by season. Each ritual will include suggestions for participating in and appreciating these storied rituals, while honoring their origins and the cultures from which they come.

This book sheds light on the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship (BMF), one of North America's major Sufi movements, and one of the first to establish a Sufi shrine in the region. It provides the first comprehensive overview of the BMF, offering new insight into its historical development and practices, and charting its establishment in both the United States and Sri Lanka. Through ethnographic research, Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism shows that the followers of Bawa in the United States and Sri Lanka share far more similarities in the relationships they formed with spaces, Bawa, and Sufism, than differences. This challenges the accepted conceptualization of Sufism in North America as having a distinct "Americanness", and prompts scholars to re-consider how Sufism is developing in the modern American landscape, as well as globally. The book focuses on the transnational spaces and ritual activities of Bawa's communities, mapping parallel shrines and pilgrimages. It examines the roles of culture, religion, and gender and their impact on ritual embodiment, drawing attention to the global range of a Sufi community through engagement with its distinct Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian followers.

"Quiara Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories." - Lin-Manuel Miranda From the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright behind IN THE HEIGHTS comes a spellbinding coming-of-age story, and a vibrant and life-affirming celebration of the women who guide us. Born in Philadelphia to a Jewish father and an enigmatic Puerto Rican mother, Quiara Alegria Hudes had a love-and-trouble-filled upbringing, haunted by the unspoken, untold family secrets of the barrio. In the face of real world wounds, the powerful, Orisha-like women of her family possessed a strength, joy and sensuality that left a young Quiara awe struck. She vowed to tell their stories. But confronted by a world that treated her like an outsider, Quiara knew she must find a new language, one which reflected the multiple cultures that raised this Puerto Rican child of North Philly. Written and spoken, English and Spanish, sacred and profane - as her search for a way to share her family's story deepened, an artist emerged, ready to speak her truth. An inspired exploration of home, family and memory, My BROKEN LANGUAGE is the story of a sharp-eyed observer who finds her voice and learns to boldly tell the stories that only she can tell.

Phoebe Palmer's honour was lost posthumously, for within a few decades after her death her name all but disappeared. Palmer's sanctification theology was separated from its apophatic spiritual moorings, even as her memory was lost. To this day the Mother of the Holiness Movement still awaits her place of recognition as a Christian mystic equal to Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, or Therese of Lisieux. This book locates Palmer's life and thought within the great Christian mystical traditions, identifying her importance within Methodism and the church universal. It also presents a Wesleyan theological framework for understanding and valuing Christian mysticism, while connecting it with the larger mystical traditions in Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox communions. While Palmer was a powerful revivalist in her own day, in many ways she could be the patron saint for contemporary Methodists who are drawn to the new monasticism and who long for the renewal of the church. Saint Phoebe is precisely the one who can help Methodists envision new forms of Christian community, mission, and witness in a postmodern world.

In an effort to attain a 'global' character, the contemporary academic discipline of International Relations (IR) increasingly seeks to surpass its Eurocentric limits, thereby opening up pathways to incorporate non-Eurocentric worldviews. Lately, many of the non-Eurocentric worldviews have emerged which either engender a 'derivative' discourse of the same Eurocentric IR theories, or construct an 'exceptionalist' discourse which is particularly applicable to the narrow experiential realities of a native time-space zone: as such, they fall short of the ambition to produce a genuinely 'non-derivative' and 'non-exceptionalist' Global IR theory. Against this backdrop, Sufism: A Theoretical Intervention in Global International Relations performs a multidisciplinary research to explore how 'Sufism' - as an established non-Western philosophy with a remarkable temporal-spatial spread across the globe - facilitates a creative intervention in the theoretical understanding of Global IR.

The Deoband movement-a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam that quickly spread from colonial India to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and even the United Kingdom and South Africa-has been poorly understood and sometimes feared. Despite being one of the most influential Muslim revivalist movements of the last two centuries, Deoband's connections to the Taliban have dominated the attention it has received from scholars and policy-makers alike. Revival from Below offers an important corrective, reorienting our understanding of Deoband around its global reach, which has profoundly shaped the movement's history. In particular, the author tracks the origins of Deoband's controversial critique of Sufism, how this critique travelled through Deobandi networks to South Africa, as well as the movement's efforts to keep traditionally educated Islamic scholars (`ulama) at the center of Muslim public life. The result is a nuanced account of this global religious network that argues we cannot fully understand Deoband without understanding the complex modalities through which it spread beyond South Asia.

Many people mistakenly understand meditation as an attempt to clear the mind and transcend the intellect. Really, meditation is meant to refine our intellect, so that we can infuse our day-to-day consciousness with Divine consciousness. Rabbi Ginsburgh presents a meditation that is a prime example of the purpose of Jewish meditation, which is to seek God, as King David says in Psalms, "with all my heart I seek You." The meditation presented in the book is based on the six constant commandments of the Torah. The meditation of Living in Divine Space essentially involves constructing a cube around oneself - a spiritual sanctuary - defined by these six commandments. The interior of the spiritual sanctuary thus built by meditation becomes the Divine Space where we can open our hearts to God in prayer. The object of prayer inside the meditation cube is to transform the meditative state into Divine living and to shift from a state of self-consciousness into one of Divine consciousness.

Can ecstatic experiences be studied with the academic instruments of rational investigation? What kinds of religious illumination are experienced by academically minded people? And what is the specific nature of the knowledge of God that university theologians of the Middle Ages enjoyed compared with other modes of knowing God, such as rapture, prophecy, the beatific vision, or simple faith? Ecstasy in the Classroom explores the interface between academic theology and ecstatic experience in the first half of the thirteenth century, formative years in the history of the University of Paris, medieval Europe's "fountain of knowledge." It considers little-known texts by William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor, William of Auvergne, Alexander of Hales, and other theologians of this community, thus creating a group portrait of a scholarly discourse. It seeks to do three things. The first is to map and analyze the scholastic discourse about rapture and other modes of cognition in the first half of the thirteenth century. The second is to explicate the perception of the self that these modes imply: the possibility of transformation and the complex structure of the soul and its habits. The third is to read these discussions as a window on the predicaments of a newborn community of medieval professionals and thereby elucidate foundational tensions in the emergent academic culture and its social and cultural context. Juxtaposing scholastic questions with scenes of contemporary courtly romances and reading Aristotle's Analytics alongside hagiographical anecdotes, Ecstasy in the Classroom challenges the often rigid historiographical boundaries between scholastic thought and its institutional and cultural context.

This book demonstrates how a local elite built upon colonial knowledge to produce a vernacular knowledge that maintained the older legacy of a pluralistic Sufism. As the British reprinted a Sufi work, Shah Abd al-Latif Bhittai's Shah jo risalo, in an effort to teach British officers Sindhi, the local intelligentsia, particularly driven by a Hindu caste of professional scribes (the Amils), seized on the moment to promote a transformation from traditional and popular Sufism (the tasawuf) to a Sufi culture (Sufiyani saqafat). Using modern tools, such as the printing press, and borrowing European vocabulary and ideology, such as Theosophical Society, the intelligentsia used Sufism as an idiomatic matrix that functioned to incorporate difference and a multitude of devotional traditions-Sufi, non-Sufi, and non-Muslim-into a complex, metaphysical spirituality that transcended the nation-state and filled the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional voids of postmodernity.

Piety and Rebellion examines the span of the Hasidic textual tradition from its earliest phases to the 20th century. The essays collected in this volume focus on the tension between Hasidic fidelity to tradition and its rebellious attempt to push the devotional life beyond the borders of conventional religious practice. Many of the essays exhibit a comparative perspective deployed to better articulate the innovative spirit, and traditional challenges, Hasidism presents to the traditional Jewish world. Piety and Rebellion is an attempt to present Hasidism as one case whereby maximalist religion can yield a rebellious challenge to conventional conceptions of religious thought and practice.

A pathbreaking history of Sufism, from the earliest centuries of Islam to the present After centuries as the most important ascetic-mystical strand of Islam, Sufism saw a sharp decline in the twentieth century, only to experience a stunning revival in recent decades. In this comprehensive new history of Sufism from the earliest centuries of Islam to today, Alexander Knysh, a leading expert on the subject, reveals the tradition in all its richness. Knysh explores how Sufism has been viewed by both insiders and outsiders since its inception. He examines the key aspects of Sufism, from definitions and discourses to leadership, institutions, and practices. He devotes special attention to Sufi approaches to the Qur'an, drawing parallels with similar uses of scripture in Judaism and Christianity. He traces how Sufism grew from a set of simple moral-ethical precepts into a sophisticated tradition with professional Sufi masters (shaykhs) who became powerful players in Muslim public life but whose authority was challenged by those advocating the equality of all Muslims before God. Knysh also examines the roots of the ongoing conflict between the Sufis and their fundamentalist critics, the Salafis--a major fact of Muslim life today. Based on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Sufism is an indispensable account of a vital aspect of Islam.

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.