Exploring religious and spiritual changes which have been taking place among Indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand, this book focuses on important changes in religious affiliation in census data over the last 15 years. Drawing on both local social and political debates, while contextualising the discussion in wider global debates about changing religious identities, especially the growth of Islam, the authors present a critical analysis of the persistent images and discourses on Aboriginal religions and spirituality. This book takes a comparative approach to other Indigenous and minority groups to explore contemporary changes in religious affiliation which have raised questions about resistance to modernity, challenges to the nation state and/or rejection of Christianity or Islam. Helena Onnudottir, Adam Posssamai and Bryan Turner offer a critical analysis to on-going public, political and sociological debates about religious conversion (especially to Islam) and changing religious affiliations (including an increase in the number of people who claim 'no religion') among Indigenous populations. This book also offers a major contribution to the growing debate about conversion to Islam among Australian Aborigines, Maoris and Pacific peoples.

Originally published in 1974 Intimacy and Ritual is a sympathetic study of spiritualist activities and their relation to the practitioners' secular lives. The book, in particular, looks at the therapeutic function of spiritualism. Based on the author's fieldwork as a 'participant observer' among spiritualists in a South Wales town, the research covers spiritualists services and meetings as well as interviews with spiritualists in their own homes. The book gives an accurate account of spiritualist doctrines and beliefs about the spirit world. The book postulates that spirit possession always relates to illness and shows how this is often the physical counterpart of social malaise. Throughout the study, spiritualism is seen in terms of the coping techniques and the rewards which it offers its members. The book shows that spiritualism is more highly regarded as a problem-solving source than the formal care-giving organizations, such as psychiatrist hospitals and the social work agencies. Healing activities are interpreted as a symbolic enactment of male and female roles ideally conceived, and spiritualist messages offer symbols and explanations of illness and misfortune.

Originally published in 1982, The Shaman and the Magician draws on the author's wide experience of occultism, western magic and anthropological knowledge of shamanism, to explore the interesting parallels between traditional shamanism and the more visionary aspects of magic in modern western society. In both cases, as the author shows, the magician encounters profound god-energies of the spirit, and it is up to the individual to interpret these experiences in psychological or mythological terms. The book demonstrates that both shamanism and magic offer techniques of approaching the visionary sources of our culture.

Originally published in 1978, The Occult Sourcebook has been compiled primarily for the many people who are for the first time becoming engrossed by the numerous and often confusing possibilities underlying the occult sciences. It consists of a series of articles on key areas, providing the reader with easy access to basic facts, together with a carefully planned guide to further reading. Critical comments on the recommended books allow the reader to select those which best suit their interests. The authors have also included a 'Who's Who of the occult' to provide short biographies of some of the more amazing figures who have already travelled down the mystic path. The book offers a programmed system of exploration into the realms of the unknown. It will be invaluable to the increasing number of people who are concerned with the exploration of enlarging human consciousness.

This volume advances our understanding of early Christianity as a lived religion by approaching it through its rites, the emotions and affects surrounding those rites, and the material setting for the practice of them. The connections between emotions and ritual, between rites and their materiality, and between emotions and their physical manifestation in ancient Mediterranean culture have been inadequately explored as yet, especially with regard to early Christianity and its water and dining rites. Readers will find all three areas-ritual, emotion, and materiality-engaged in this exemplary interdisciplinary study, which provides fresh insights into early Christianity and its world. Ritual, Emotion, and Materiality in the Early Christian World will be of special interest to interdisciplinary-minded researchers, seminarians, and students who are attentive to theory and method, and those with an interest in the New Testament and earliest Christianity. It will also appeal to those working on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman religion, emotion, and ritual from a comparative standpoint.

This volume examines the prevalence, function, and socio-political effects of slavery discourse in the major theological formulations of the late third to early fifth centuries AD, arguably the most formative period of early Christian doctrine. The question the book poses is this: in what way did the Christian theologians of the third, fourth, and early fifth centuries appropriate the discourse of slavery in their theological formulations, and what could the effect of this appropriation have been for actual physical slaves? This fascinating study is crucial reading for anyone with an interest in early Christianity or Late Antiquity, and slavery more generally.

This book argues that moral theology has yet to embrace the recommendations of the Second Vatican Council concerning the ways in which it is to be renewed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of consensus between theologians regarding the nature, content and uniqueness of Christian morality. After highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the so-called autonomy and faith ethic schools of thought, Mealey argues that there is little dividing them and that, in some instances, both schools are simply defending one aspect of a hermeneutical dialectic. In an attempt to move away from the divisions between proponents of the faith-ethic and autonomy positions, Mealey enlists the help of the hermeneutical theory of Paul Ricoeur. She argues that many of the disagreements arising from the Christian proprium debate can be overcome if scholars look to the possibilities opened up by Ricoeur's hermeneutics of interpretation. Mealey also argues that the uniqueness of Christian morality is more adequately explained in terms of a specific identity (self) that is constantly subject to change and revision in light of many, often conflicting, moral sources. She advocates a move away from attempts to explain the uniqueness of Christian morality in terms of one specific, unchanging context, motivation, norm, divine command or value. By embracing the possibilities opened up by Ricoeurian hermeneutics, Mealey explains how concepts such as revelation, tradition, orthodoxy and moral conscience may be understood in a hermeneutical way without being deemed sectarian or unorthodox.

This book provides a new sociological account of contemporary religious phenomena such as channelling, holistic healing, meditation and divination, which are usually classed as part of a New Age Movement. Drawing on his extensive ethnography carried out in the UK, alongside comparative studies in America and Europe, Matthew Wood criticises the view that such phenomena represent spirituality in which self-authority is paramount. Instead, he emphasises the role of social authority and the centrality of spirit possession, linking these to participants' class positions and experiences of secularisation. Informed by sociological and anthropological approaches to social power and practice, especially the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, Wood's study explores what he calls the nonformative regions of the religious field, and charts similarities and differences with pagan, spiritualist and Theosophical traditions.

This book offers a conversant and comprehensive overview of the themes and concepts in spiritual tourism and Millennial tourists. Providing interdisciplinary insights from leading international researchers and academicians, this makes a critical contribution to the knowledge around spiritual tourism. Organized into four parts, the edited book provides modern and cutting-edge perspectives on important topics like linkages between spirituality and tourism, the predicament of spirituality in tourism among Millennials, anthropological views on spirituality, the work-life-balance, marketing of spiritual tourism destinations and the issues, threats and prospects of spiritual tourism in the emerging era. Part I introduces core concepts, theories on spiritual tourism and links it with the Millennial world. Part II explores the inclinations of millennials towards spirituality and their travel motivations, experiences, behaviours with special reference to spirituality. In Part III, on holistic tourism, the role of digitization in spiritual tourism adoption, marketing and management perspectives with special reference to Millennials are discussed. Part IV examines the issues, threats, policies and practices linked with spiritual tourism. This part also aims to explore the future challenges, opportunities for spiritual tourism development and to propose research-based solutions. Overall, the book will be a suitable means of getting insight into the minds of the diverse, experimental and open-minded generation of millennials. This book will fill the gap of research on spiritual tourism. As an edited book, it will add on new research and knowledge base with high quality contributions from researchers and practitioners interested in tourism management, hospitality management, business studies regional development and destination management.

This collection of essays explores the rhetoric and practices surrounding views on life after death and the end of the world, including the fate of the individual, apocalyptic speculation and hope for cosmological renewal, in a wide range of societies from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Byzantine era. The 42 essays by leading scholars in each field explore the rich spectrum of ways in which eschatological understanding can be expressed, and for which purposes it can be used. Readers will gain new insight into the historical contexts, details, functions and impact of eschatological ideas and imagery in ancient texts and material culture from the twenty-fifth century BCE to the ninth century CE. Traditionally, the study of "eschatology" (and related concepts) has been pursued mainly by scholars of Jewish and Christian scripture. By broadening the disciplinary scope but remaining within the clearly defined geographical milieu of the Mediterranean, this volume enables its readers to note comparisons and contrasts, as well as exchanges of thought and transmission of eschatological ideas across Antiquity. Cross-referencing, high quality illustrations and extensive indexing contribute to a rich resource on a topic of contemporary interest and relevance. Eschatology in Antiquity is aimed at readers from a wide range of academic disciplines, as well as non-specialists including seminary students and religious leaders. The primary audience will comprise researchers in relevant fields including Biblical Studies, Classics and Ancient History, Ancient Philosophy, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Art History, Late Antiquity, Byzantine Studies and Cultural Studies. Care has been taken to ensure that the essays are accessible to undergraduates and those without specialist knowledge of particular subject areas.

A comparative analysis of both secular and religious communal groups in contemporary America, this study, originally published in 1978, shows that contemporary communalists stand in relation to collectivism much the same as early Protestants stood in relation to individualism - as the self-proclaimed pioneers of the new age. There is great diversity among communal groups, a diversity which is found to stem from alternative orientations towards time and alternative assumptions about the cognitive status of the social world. The author has made use of a phenomenologically derived typological framework to organize the data he has obtained through living in and visiting a number of communal groups. Within this framework, Alfred Schutz's 'mundane' phenomenology and Max Weber's interpretive sociology are employed as ways of approaching the situated sociology of knowledge in various communal groups. Six ideal types of communal groups are described: the commune, the intentional association, the community, the warring sect, the other-worldly sect and the ecstatic association. Two of these types - the intentional association and the community - are identified as participants' efforts to demonstrate 'worldly utopian' models for the reconstruction of society at large.

Prudentius' Crown of Martyrs offers an English translation, with introduction and commentary, of the Liber Peristephanon, Prudentius' vivid collection of lyric hymns in honor of Christian martyrs. To render Prudentius' metrically varied lines for twenty-first-century readers, Len Krisak relies on the inherent iambic nature of English. The introduction offers insight into social, political, and literary features of the fourth century, the life of Prudentius, the poet's other works, his Latinity and mastery of ancient meters, and the manuscript tradition and the reception of Prudentius in the Middle Ages and beyond. Given Prudentius' central place in the history of Latin poetry, this translation is a welcome resource for general readers interested in Western literary history. It will also find a home with scholarly audiences working on Late Antique and Early Christian literature and culture, in a wide variety of college classrooms and in academic libraries.

The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts analyzes a large corpus of early Christian texts and Pseudepigraphic materials to understand how the authors of these texts used, abused and silenced enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions. The focus is on excavating the texts "from below" or "against the grain" in order to notice the slaves, and in so doing, to problematize and (re)imagine the narratives. Noticing the slaves as literary iterations means paying attention to broader theological, ideological, and rhetorical aims of the texts within which enslaved bodies are constructed. The analysis demonstrates that by silencing slaves and using a rhetoric of violence, the authors of these texts contributed to the construction of myths in which slaves functioned as a useful trope to support the combined power of religion and empire. Thus was created not only the perfect template for the rise and development of a Christian discourse of slavery, but also a rationale for subsequent violence exercised against slave bodies within the Christian Empire. The study demonstrates the value of using the tools and applying the insights of subaltern studies to the study of the Pseudepigrapha and in early Christian texts. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars of early Christianity, but also to those working on the history of slavery and subaltern studies in antiquity.

This book challenges the popular use of 'Valentinian' to describe a Christian school of thought in the second century CE by analysing documents ascribed to 'Valentinians' by early Christian Apologists, and more recently by modern scholars after the discovery of codices near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. To this end, Ashwin-Siejkowski highlights the great diversity of views among Christian theologians associated with the label 'Valentinian', demonstrating their attachment to the Scriptures and Apostolic traditions as well as their dialogue with Graeco-Roman philosophies of their time. Among the various themes explored are 'myth' and its role in early Christian theology, the familiarity of the Gospel of Truth with Alexandrian exegetical tradition, Ptolemy's didactic in his letter to Flora, the image of the Saviour in the Interpretation of Knowledge, reception of the Johannine motifs in Heracleon's commentary and the Tripartite Tractate, salvation in the Excerpts from Theodotus, Christian identity in the Gospel of Philip, and reception of selected Johannine motifs in 'Valentinian' documents. Valentinus' Legacy and Polyphony of Voices will be an invaluable and accessible resource to students, researchers, and scholars of Early Christian theologies, as well as trajectories of exegesis in New Testament sources and the emerging of different Christian identities based on various Christologies.

The great existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger famously pointed out to Freud that therapeutic failure could "only be understood as the result of something which could be called a deficiency of spirit." Binswanger was surprised when Freud agreed, asserting, "Yes, spirit is everything." However, spirit and the spiritual realm have largely been dropped from mainstream psychoanalytic theory and practice. This book seeks to help revitalize a culturally aging psychoanalysis that is in conceptual and clinical disarray in the marketplace of ideas and is viewed as a "theory in crisis" no longer regarded as the primary therapy for those who are suffering. The author argues that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be reinvigorated as a discipline if it is animated by the powerfully evocative spiritual, moral, and ethical insights of two dialogical personalist religious philosophers-Martin Buber, a Jew, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic-who both initiated a "Copernican revolution" in human thought. In chapters that focus on love, work, faith, suffering, and clinical practice, Paul Marcus shows how the spiritual optic of Buber and Marcel can help revive and refresh psychoanalysis, and bring it back into the light by communicating its inherent vitality, power, and relevance to the mental health community and to those who seek psychoanalytic treatment.

Explores how bodies of knowledge developed, concerning folkloric beliefs, magic, sorcery, and witchcraft from the 12th -18th century which allows students to see how culture was exchanged across Europe leading up to the witch-trials of the 17th century and offers an explanation of why the witch-hunts and trials became so prevalent due to a strong belief in the existence of witchcraft in the popular conscious. The collection looks at a range of sources which crossed the religions, political and linguistic boundaries such as objects, legal documents, letters, art, literature, the oral tradition and pamphlets providing students with a range of case studies to deepen their understanding of the period and to inform their own research. Includes examples from across Europe from England to Italy, Norway to France and the Netherlands to Spain. Allowing students to see how these cultural exchanges crossed geographical boundaries to form a collective phenomenon.

Explores how bodies of knowledge developed, concerning folkloric beliefs, magic, sorcery, and witchcraft from the 12th -18th century which allows students to see how culture was exchanged across Europe leading up to the witch-trials of the 17th century and offers an explanation of why the witch-hunts and trials became so prevalent due to a strong belief in the existence of witchcraft in the popular conscious. The collection looks at a range of sources which crossed the religions, political and linguistic boundaries such as objects, legal documents, letters, art, literature, the oral tradition and pamphlets providing students with a range of case studies to deepen their understanding of the period and to inform their own research. Includes examples from across Europe from England to Italy, Norway to France and the Netherlands to Spain. Allowing students to see how these cultural exchanges crossed geographical boundaries to form a collective phenomenon.

New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy examines the relationship between alternative American religions and the media representation of non-monogamies on reality-TV shows like Sister Wives, Seeking Sister Wife, and Polyamory: Married & Dating. The book is the first full-length study informed by fieldwork with Mormon polygamists and fieldwork with LGBTQ Neo-Pagan/Neo-Tantric polyamorists. The book tracks community members' responses to the new media about them, their engagement with television and other media, and the likeness of representations to actual populations through fieldwork and interviews. The book highlights differences in socioeconomic privileges that shape Mormon polygamists' lives and LGBTQ polyamorists' lives, respectively. The polyamory movement receives support from liberal media. As reality TV has shifted the image of Mormon polygamy to one of liberal American middle-class culture, Mormon polygamists have gained in public favor. The media landscape of non-monogamy is mediated by, in addition to these alternative religious populations, the norms and practices of the reality-TV industry and by sociocultural and economic realities, including race and class. This book adds to the fields of media studies, critical race and gender studies, new religious movements, and queer studies.

Does science argue against the existence of the human soul? Many scientists and scholars believe the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This book uses information and systems theory to describe the "more" that does not reduce to the parts. One sees this in the synapses"or apparently empty gaps between the neurons in one's brain"where informative relationships give rise to human mind, culture, and spirituality. Drawing upon the disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience, general systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and Christian theology, Mark Graves reinterprets the traditional doctrine of the soul as form of the body to frame contemporary scientific study of the human soul.

Goddess as Nature makes a significant contribution to elucidating the meaning of a female and feminist deity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Bridging the gap between the emergent religious discourse of thealogy - discourse about the Goddess - and a range of analytical concerns in the philosophy of religion, the author argues that thealogy is not as incoherent as many of its critics claim. By developing a close reading of the reality-claims embedded within a range of thealogical texts, one can discern an ecological and pantheistic concept of deity and reality that is metaphysically novel and in need of constructive philosophical, thealogical and scholarly engagement. Philosophical thealogy is, in an age concerned with re-conceiving nature in terms of agency, chaos, complexity, ecological networks and organicism, both an active possibility and a remarkably valuable academic, feminist and religious endeavour.

Human Interaction with the Divine, the Sacred, and the Deceased brings together cutting-edge empirical and theoretical contributions from scholars in fields including psychology, theology, ethics, neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy, to examine how and why humans engage in, or even seek spiritual experiences and connection with the immaterial world. In this richly interdisciplinary volume, Plante and Schwartz recognize human interaction with the divine and departed as a cross-cultural and historical universal that continues to concern diverse disciplines. Accounting for variances in belief and human perception and use, the book is divided into four major sections: personal experience; theological consideration; medical, technological, and scientific considerations; and psychological considerations with chapters addressing phenomena including prayer, reincarnation, sensed presence, and divine revelations. Featuring scholars specializing in theology, psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and ethics, this book provides a thoughtful, compelling, evidence-based, and contemporary approach to gain a grounded perspective on current understandings of human interaction with the divine, the sacred, and the deceased. Of interest to believers, questioners, and unbelievers alike, this volume will be key reading for researchers, scholars, and academics engaged in the fields of religion and psychology, social psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and health psychology. Readers with a broader interest in spiritualism, religious and non-religious movements will also find the text of interest.

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic-which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters-Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

'Mystical theology' has developed through a range of meanings, from the hidden dimensions of divine significance in the community's interpretation of its scriptures to the much later 'science' of the soul's ascent into communion with God. The thinkers and questions addressed in this book draws us into the heart of a complicated, beautiful, and often tantalisingly unfinished conversation, continuing over centuries and often brushing allusively into parallel concerns in other religions. Raising fundamental matters of epistemology, representation, metaphysics, and divine reality, contributors approach the mystical from postmodern, feminist, sociological and historical perspectives through thinkers such as Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, William James, Evelyn Underhill, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Otto, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chretien. Medieval and early modern radical prophetic approaches are also explored. This book includes new essays by Sarah Apetrei, Tina Beattie, Raphel Cadenhead, Oliver Davies, Philip Endean, Brian FitzGerald, Ann Loades, George Pattison, Simon D. Podmore, Joel D.S. Rasmussen, and Johannes Zachhuber.

Offering a new template for future exploration, Susan Greenwood examines and develops the notion that the experience of magic is a panhuman orientation of consciousness, a form of knowledge largely marginalized in Western societies. In this volume she aims to form a "bridge of communication" between indigenous magical or shamanic worldviews and rationalized Western cultures. She outlines an alternative mythological framework for the latter to help develop a magical perception, as well as giving practical case studies derived from her own research. The form of magic discussed here is not fantastic or virtual, but ecological and sensory. Magical knowledge infiltrates the body in its deepest levels of the subconscious, and unconscious, as well as conscious awareness; it is felt and understood through the connection with an inspirited world that includes the consciousness of other beings, including those of plant, animal and the physical environment. This is anthropology from the heart rather than the head, and it engages with the messy area of emotions, an embodiment of the senses, and struggles to find a common language of listening to one another across a void of differences. The aim is to provide a non-reductive structure for the creative interplay of both magical and analytical modes of thought. Passion is a motivator for change, and a change in attitude to magic as an integrative force of human understanding is the main thread of this work.