Discover How Whitmans Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your Own Whitmans collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential, to learning about and from ourselves. To experience his writing is to experience ourselves more deeply. from the Preface by Gary David Comstock Walt Whitman was the most innovative and influential poet of the nineteenth century. The self-proclaimed American Bard, Whitman challenged his contemporaries to resist conforming to society and shocked them with his embrace of the sensual. But beneath his manifesto for social revolution lies a vigorous call for spiritual revolution as well. This beautiful sampling of Whitmans most important poetry from Leaves of Grass, and selections from his prose writings, offers a glimpse into the spiritual side of his most radical themeslove for country, love for others, and love of Self. Whitman seeks to tear down the belief that the spiritual resides only in the religious and embraces the idea that nothing is more divine than humankind, nothing greater than the individual soul. Rich with passion, reverence, and wonder, this unique collection offers insight into Whitmans quest for self-discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world. Though seemingly personal, his verse speaks to universal harmony and universal love, optimism and joy, and celebrates the outwardly mundane details of life through words electrified with love and spirit.

Publishers' catalogues are full of books on the Church's view of homosexuality; Gary David Comstock here offers gay views of the church. Given the often hostile environment, he asks why gay people stay in religious institutions. Using social scientific methods, he summarizes 36 surveys of gay attitudes toward religious communities, including Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and Native American traditions. He adds data from his survey of gay people in two mainline Protestant denominations.

This book features interviews with twenty black scholars and religious leaders who speak out--from various theological perspectives--against institutional prejudice toward gay and lesbian people. The interviews are conducted in a conversational format in language that will be accessible and interesting to lay readers.

Is it possible to be religious and to be gay, lesbian, or queer? Until recently, many persons - gay or straight - would have said no. But over the past decade or so, a vast literature has emerged of personal narrative, apologetic, and polemic, asserting both the existence and acceptability of such dual identities. Que(e)rying Religion includes but moves beyond tradition-based experiential writing by turning to the academic study of religion. It includes work that compares or focuses on different religious traditions, such as various forms of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Native American spiritualities. It also incorporates writing on various geographical areas and historical time periods. By assuming a wide definition of religion, it raises questions about the terms religion and religious themselves. Read together, the contents of Que(e)rying Religion provide access to a broad selection of work at the intersection of religious studies and lesbian/gay/queer studies.

Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men is the first book to reveal the shocking problem of anti-gay/lesbian violence. Beginning with an overview of the emergence of lesbian and gay neighbourhoods in major U.S. cities after World War II, Comstock describes how the increased visibility of lesbians and gay men was followed by physical attacks that were illegal but socially sanctioned. He presents results of his survey on present-day violence and then studies the perpetrators, using information supplied by survey participants as well as reports from the media, court records, and personal interviews. Finally, Comstock proposes a sociological explanation for the fact that adolescent males are the group most prone to violence against lesbians and gay men.