Download Free Spiritual History Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Spiritual History and write the review.

Water has long been associated with the magical, the mysterious and the divine. From sacred springs to holy wells, and from hydropathic cures and temperance reform to the modern spa, Ian Bradley explores how water's creative, health-giving and restorative powers have been conceived, worshipped and marketed in an essentially spiritual way. In pre-Christian times, springs and rivers were seen as the dwelling places of deities with magical life-giving and curative powers, associated especially with the feminine and with ritual cleansing and rebirth. With the coming of Christianity, water was incorporated into Christian ritual and tradition through baptism and the cult of holy wells. From the 16th century onwards, the benefits of water came to be seen more in terms of therapeutic healing than the miraculous. Through the development of drinking and bathing cures, spas and hydrotherapy, a more scientific but still essentially spiritual understanding of the curative properties of water was developed. By the eighteenth century, spas and watering places had acquired their own enchanted and mysterious qualities, in many ways taking the place of medieval pilgrim shrines. Now, a new, more hedonistic kind of pilgrim comes to modern spas to experience a potent post-modern elixir of self-oriented well-being.
At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.
It has been suggested that 'spirituality' has become a word that 'can define an era'. Why? Because paradoxically, alongside a decline in traditional religious affiliations, the growing interest in spirituality and the use of the word in a variety of contexts is a striking aspect of contemporary western cultures. Indeed, spirituality is sometimes contrasted attractively with religion, although this is problematic and implies that religion is essentially dogma, moralism, institutions, buildings, and hierarchies. The notion of spirituality expresses the fact that many people are driven by goals that concern more than material satisfaction. Broadly, it refers to the deepest values and sense of meaning by which people seek to live. Sometimes these values are conventionally religious. Sometimes they are associated with what is understood as 'the sacred' in a broader sense - that is, of ultimate rather than merely instrumental importance. This Very Short Introduction, written by one of the most eminent scholars and writers on spirituality, explores the historical foundations of the thought and considers how it came to have the significance it is developing today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism. Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion. Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.
Whether she is writing about bats, bees, procupines, or wolves, contemplating the mysteries of caves, or delving into the traditions, beliefs, and myths of Native American cultures, Linda Hogan expresses a deep reverence for the dwelling we all share--the Earth. 16 line drawings.
For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.
A leading scholar explores the importance of physical objects and sensory experience in the practice of religion. A History of Religion in 5½ Objects takes a fresh and much-needed approach to the study of that contentious yet vital area of human culture: religion. Arguing that religion must be understood in the first instance as deriving from rudimentary human experiences, from lived, embodied practices, S. Brent Plate asks us to put aside, for the moment, questions of belief and abstract ideas. Instead, beginning with the desirous, incomplete human body, he asks us to focus on five ordinary objects—stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread—with which we connect in our pursuit of religious meaning and fulfillment. As Plate considers each of these objects, he explores how the world’s religious traditions have put each of them to different uses throughout the millennia. Religion, it turns out, has as much to do with our bodies as our beliefs. Maybe even more.
This open access volume is the first academic book on the controversial issue of including spiritual care in integrated electronic medical records (EMR). Based on an international study group comprising researchers from Europe (The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland), the United States, Canada, and Australia, this edited collection provides an overview of different charting practices and experiences in various countries and healthcare contexts. Encompassing case studies and analyses of theological, ethical, legal, healthcare policy, and practical issues, the volume is a groundbreaking reference for future discussion, research, and strategic planning for inter- or multi-faith healthcare chaplains and other spiritual care providers involved in the new field of documenting spiritual care in EMR. Topics explored among the chapters include: Spiritual Care Charting/Documenting/Recording/Assessment Charting Spiritual Care: Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Aspects Palliative Chaplain Spiritual Assessment Progress Notes Charting Spiritual Care: Ethical Perspectives Charting Spiritual Care in Digital Health: Analyses and Perspectives Charting Spiritual Care: The Emerging Role of Chaplaincy Records in Global Health Care is an essential resource for researchers in interprofessional spiritual care and healthcare chaplaincy, healthcare chaplains and other spiritual caregivers (nurses, physicians, psychologists, etc.), practical theologians and health ethicists, and church and denominational representatives.
As the first true social history of New Age culture, this presents an unrivalled overview of the diverse varieties of New Age belief and practise from the 1930s to the present day.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.-Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona-Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a 'wild' frontier were stymied by labour struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.-Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.