This landmark work presents the most illuminating portrait we have to date of goddesses and sacred female imagery in Western culture-from prehistory to contemporary goddess movements.
In the Course of a Lifetime provides an unprecedented portrait of the dynamic role religion plays in the everyday experiences of Americans over the course of their lives.
A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life-Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "e;discovery"e; of Indian religions by European scholars.
Motivated variously by the desire to reject consumerism, to live closer to the earth, to embrace voluntary simplicity, or to discover a more spiritual path, homesteaders have made the radical decision to go "e;back to the land,"e; rejecting modern culture and amenities to live self-sufficiently and in harmony with nature.
Sexuality and the occult arts have long been associated in the western imagination, but it was not until the nineteenth century that a large and sophisticated body of literature on sexual magic-the use of sex as a source of magical power-emerged.
UFO phenomena entered American consciousness at the beginning of the Cold War, when reports from astonished witnesses of encounters with unknown aerial objects captured the attention of the United States military and the imagination of the press and the public.
Rara is a vibrant annual street festival in Haiti, when followers of the Afro-Creole religion called Vodou march loudly into public space to take an active role in politics.
Finally, social scientists have begun to attempt to understand religious behavior rather than to discredit it as irrational, ignorant, or foolish-and Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have played a major role in this new approach.
Recent decades have seen a revival of paganism, and every summer people gather across the United States to celebrate this increasingly popular religion.
The long twentieth century in China and Taiwan has seen both a dramatic process of state-driven secularization and modernization and a vigorous revival of contemporary religious life.
Beyond Belief collects fifteen celebrated, broadly ranging essays in which Robert Bellah interprets the interplay of religion and society in concrete contexts from Japan to the Middle East to the United States.
How Christian leaders adapted the governmental practices and political thought of their Muslim rulers in the Abbasid caliphateThe Imam of the Christians examines how Christian leaders adopted and adapted the political practices and ideas of their Muslim rulers between 750 and 850 in the Abbasid caliphate in the Jazira (modern eastern Turkey and northern Syria).
A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic eraHow did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process?
This book presents an argument that intelligent design is a well-designed marketing plan aimed at imposing a theistic naturalism in schools and scientific discourse.
