This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the 'evil eye' produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.

Cultural Pearls from the East offers fascinating insights into Muslim-Arab culture and the evolution of its intellectual nature and literary texts from early Islam to modern times. The textual analysis of largely unexplored literary works and chronicles that epitomize this volume highlight the affinity between culture, society, and politics, exploring these issues from both thematic and comparative perspectives. Among the topics examined in depth: Arabic poetry of warfare at the dawn of Islam; medieval poems about venerated sites and saints; Ottoman and Egyptian chronicles portraying the socioreligious landscapes of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent under the Ottoman Empire and in the shadow of growing European encroachment; and Arab-Jewish literature dealing with suppression, exile, and identity. Contributors: Ghaleb Anabseh, Albert Arazi, Meir M. Bar-Asher, Peter Chelkowski, Geula Elimelekh, Sigal Goorj, Jane Hathaway, Meir Hatina, Yair Huri-Horesh, Amir Lerner, Menachem Milson, Gabriel M. Rosenbaum, Joseph Sadan, Yona Sheffer, Norman (Noam) A. Stillman, Ibrahim Taha, Michael Winter, Eman Younis