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The present book by Hu Baozhu explores the subject of ghosts and spirits and attempts to map the religious landscape of ancient China. The main focus of attention is the character gui 鬼, an essential key to the understanding of spiritual beings. The author analyses the character gui in various materials – lexicons and dictionaries, excavated manuscripts and inscriptions, and received classical texts. Gui is examined from the perspective of its linguistic root, literary interpretation, ritual practices, sociopolitical implication, and cosmological thinking. In the gradual process of coming to know the otherworld in terms of ghosts and spirits, Chinese people in ancient times attempted to identify and classify these spiritual entities. In their philosophical thinking, they connected the subject of gui with the movement of the universe. Thus the belief in ghosts and spirits in ancient China appeared to be a moral standard for all, not only providing a room for individual religiosity but also implementing the purpose of family-oriented social order, the legitimization of political operations, and the understanding of the way of Heaven and Earth.
Psychics, mediums, and ghosts have become a sensation in our culture today. As a result, there are many confusing and deceptive beliefs presented. Ron Rhodes, respected and popular biblical scholar, tackles the truth about ghosts and those who say they communicate with them and answers the questions: Do ghosts in any shape or form exist? Why is there a rise in psychic phenomena today? What do psychics believe about God, Jesus, and salvation? What is Satan's role with the paranormal? How can parents protect their family from the psychic trend? This reader-friendly presentation of intriguing facts and biblical insights will help Christians know how to respond to this fascination with the ultimate truth.
A past case comes back to haunt Twin Cities P.I. McKenzie as a stolen sum of money threatens to resurface in From the Grave, the next mystery in David Housewright’s award-winning series. Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie became an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. But this time, he finds himself in dire need of working on his own behalf. His dear friend and first love Shelby Dunston attends a public reading by a psychic medium with the hope of connecting with her grandfather one final time. Instead, she hears McKenzie’s name spoken by the psychic in connection with a huge sum of stolen—and missing—money. Caught in a world of psychic mediums, with a man from his past with a stake in the future, and more than one party willing to go to great and deadly lengths to get involved, McKenzie must figure out just how much he’s willing to believe—like his life depends on it—before everything takes a much darker turn.
Shawn C. Smallman and Kimberley Brown's popular introductory textbook for undergraduates in international and global studies is now released in a substantially revised and updated third edition. Encompassing the latest scholarship in what has become a markedly interdisciplinary endeavor and an increasingly chosen undergraduate major, the book introduces key concepts, themes, and issues and then examines each in lively chapters on essential topics, including the history of globalization; economic, political, and cultural globalization; security, energy, and development; health; agriculture and food; and the environment. Within these topics the authors explore such diverse and pressing subjects as commodity chains, labor (including present-day slavery), pandemics, human rights, and multinational corporations and the connections among them. This textbook, used successfully in both traditional and online courses, provides the newest and most crucial information needed for understanding our rapidly changing world. New to this edition: *Close to 50% new material *New illustrations, maps, and tables *New and expanded emphases on political and economic globalization and populism; health; climate change, and development *Extensively revised exercises and activities *New resume-writing exercise in careers chapter *Thoroughly revised online teacher's manual
Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A comprehensive, authoritative and readable history of the evolution of the ghost in the west, examining the behavior of the subject in its preferred environment: the stories we tell each other. "Roger Clarke tells this [the story that inspired Henry James' The Turn of the Screw] and many other gloriously weird stories with real verve, and also a kind of narrative authority that tends to constrain the skeptical voice within... [An] erudite and richly entertaining book." —New York Times Book Review No matter how rationally we order our lives, few of us are completely immune to the suggestion of the uncanny and the fear of the dark. What explains sightings of ghosts? Why do they fascinate us? What exactly do those who have been haunted see? What did they believe? And what proof is there? Taking us through the key hauntings that have obsessed the world, from the true events that inspired Henry James's classic The Turn of the Screw right up to the present day, Roger Clarke unfolds a story of class conflict, charlatans, and true believers. The cast list includes royalty and prime ministers, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Harry Houdini, and Adolf Hitler. The chapters cover everything from religious beliefs to modern developments in neuroscience, the medicine of ghosts, and the technology of ghosthunting. There are haunted WWI submarines, houses so blighted by phantoms they are demolished, a seventeenth-century Ghost Hunter General, and the emergence of the Victorian flash mob, where hundreds would stand outside rumored sites all night waiting to catch sight of a dead face at a window. Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, A Natural History of Ghosts takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe.
A story of faith and fraud in post-Civil War America told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead
Religious capacity is a highly elaborate, neurocognitive human trait that has a solid evolutionary foundation. This book uses a multidisciplinary approach to describe millions of years of biological innovations that eventually give rise to the modern trait and its varied expression in humanity’s many religions. The authors present a scientific model and a central thesis that the brain organs, networks, and capacities that allowed humans to survive physically also gave our species the ability to create theologies, find sustenance in religious practice, and use religion to support the social group. Yet, the trait of religious capacity remains non-obligatory, like reading and mathematics. The individual can choose not to use it. The approach relies on research findings in nine disciplines, including the work of countless neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. This is a cutting-edge examination of the evolutionary origins of humanity’s interaction with the supernatural. It will be of keen interest to academics working in Religious Studies, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Evolutionary Biology, and Psychology.
The paranormal has gone mainstream.Beliefs are on the rise, with almost half of the British population, and two thirds of Americans, claiming to believe in extra sensory perceptions and hauntings. Psychic magazines like Spirit and Destiny, television shows such as Fringe, Ghost Whisperer and Most Haunted, ghost-cams and e-poltergeists, bestselling books on mind, body and spirit, and magicians like Derren Brown have moved from the outer limits to the centre of popular culture, turning paranormal beliefs and scepticism into revenue streams. Paranormal Media offers a unique, timely exploration of the extraordinary, unexplained and supernatural in popular culture, looking in unusual places in order to understand this phenomenon. Early spirit forms such as magic lantern shows or the spirit photograph are re-imagined as a search for extraordinary experiences in reality TV, ghost tourism, and live shows. Through a popular cultural ethnography, and critical analysis in social and cultural theory, this ground-breaking book by Annette Hill presents an original and rigorous examination of people's experiences of spirits and magic. In popular culture, people are players in an orchestral movement about what happens to us when we die. In a very real sense the audience is the show. This book is the story of audiences and their participation in a show about matters of life and death. Paranormal Media will be a highly interesting read for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as academics, on a wide range of television, media, cultural studies, and sociology courses.
This book is a partial history of religion and its beliefs and how they impact on our thinking about the supernatural. I have tried to show how the views of early man have had such a significant influence on the thoughts of people today, about the belief in the devil and demons, poltergeists, ghosts, evil spirits, etc. That they are all myths that have been propagated by religions across the world to encourage people to worship their particular god. How there was a momentous change in religious thinking when humankind moved from many gods (Polytheism) to one God (Monotheism). How hauntings are nothing more than negative or lost spirits trying to interact with this world for either help or to cause fear and discomfort. Even today there is a belief in lucky charms and superstition that runs through our everyday thoughts. The examples of possession and hauntings that we hear about more and more are nothing more than the spirits of people who have died playing on our beliefs. For example, if you believe the devil is attacking you then that's what the spirits will show you. They will prey on your fears to get the greatest effect. The more you believe you can be attacked by demons, the devil, ghosts and the like the more vulnerable you are to interference. How the more advanced medical science has become, the fewer people believe disease is the work of evil spirits, yet even today there are places around the world where exorcisms are performed to cure people of disease. How religious rituals still play a big part in supposedly removing unwanted spirits regardless of whether they are evil or lost and where they think they end up. I have examined how and why spirits get lost and show examples of how to help them find peace. How some may not even know, they are causing discomfort and pain to the living. I have discussed the different beliefs of some of the major religions regarding life after death and how they consider people will attain eternal peace.