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Author: Sarah M. Pike
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231124031
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Sarah Pike traces the history of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States from their origins in the nineteenth century to their reemergence in the 1960s counterculture. She also considers the differences and similarities between the New Age and Neopagan movements as well as the antagonistic relationship between these two practices and other religions in America, particularly Christianity. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, she offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. Her book is a rich analysis of these spiritual worlds and social networks and questions why these faiths are flourishing at this point in American history.
Author: Sarah M. Pike
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231124031
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
Sarah Pike traces the history of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States from their origins in the nineteenth century to their reemergence in the 1960s counterculture. She also considers the differences and similarities between the New Age and Neopagan movements as well as the antagonistic relationship between these two practices and other religions in America, particularly Christianity. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, she offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. Her book is a rich analysis of these spiritual worlds and social networks and questions why these faiths are flourishing at this point in American history.
Author: Hugh B. Urban
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520281187
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements is the most extensive study to date of modern American alternative spiritual currents. Hugh B. Urban covers a range of emerging religions from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the Nation of Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, ISKCON, Wicca, the Church of Satan, Peoples Temple, and the Branch Davidians. This essential text engages students by addressing major theoretical and methodological issues in the study of new religions and is organized to guide students in their learning. Each chapter focuses on one important issue involving a particular faith group, providing readers with examples that illustrate larger issues in the study of religion and American culture. Urban addresses such questions as, Why has there been such a tremendous proliferation of new spiritual forms in the past 150 years, even as our society has become increasingly rational, scientific, technological, and secular? Why has the United States become the heartland for the explosion of new religious movements? How do we deal with complex legal debates, such as the use of peyote by the Native American Church or the practice of plural marriage by some Mormon communities? And how do we navigate issues of religious freedom and privacy in an age of religious violence, terrorism, and government surveillance?
Author: Sarah M. Pike
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231508387
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
From Shirley MacLaine's spiritual biography Out on a Limb to the teenage witches in the film The Craft, New Age and Neopagan beliefs have made sensationalistic headlines. In the mid- to late 1990s, several important scholarly studies of the New Age and Neopagan movements were published, attesting to academic as well as popular recognition that these religions are a significant presence on the contemporary North American religious landscape. Self-help books by New Age channelers and psychics are a large and growing market; annual spending on channeling, self-help businesses, and alternative health care is at $10 to $14 billion; an estimated 12 million Americans are involved with New Age activities; and American Neopagans are estimated at around 200,000. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America introduces the beliefs and practices behind the public faces of these controversial movements, which have been growing steadily in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. What is the New Age movement, and how is it different from and similar to Neopaganism in its underlying beliefs and still-evolving practices? Where did these decentralized and eclectic movements come from, and why have they grown and flourished at this point in American religious history? What is the relationship between the New Age and Neopaganism and other religions in America, particularly Christianity, which is often construed as antagonistic to them? Drawing on historical and ethnographic accounts, Sarah Pike explores these questions and offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. The book provides a general introduction to the varieties of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States today as well as an account of their nineteenth-century roots and emergence from the 1960s counterculture. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, it also furnishes a rich description and analysis of the spiritual worlds and social networks created by participants.
Author: Shirley MacLaine
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307765040
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
MORE THAN 3 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT • “A stunningly honest, engrossing account . . . Shirley MacLaine’s discovery of a new sense of purpose, joy, energy, and love will touch and astonish you.”—Literary Guild Magazine An outspoken thinker, a celebrated actress, a truly independent woman, Shirley MacLaine takes us on an intimate yet powerful journey into her personal life and inner self. An intense, clandestine love affair with a prominent politician sparks Shirley’s quest of self-discovery. From Stockholm to Hawaii to the mountain vastness of Peru, from disbelief to radiant affirmation, she at last discovers the roots of her very existence . . . and the infinite possibilities of life. Shirley opens her heart to explore the meaning of a great and enduring passion with her lover Gerry; the mystery of her soul’s connection with her best friend David; the tantalizing secrets behind a great actor’s inspiration with the late Peter Sellers. And through it all, Shirley’s courage and candor opens new doors, new insights, new revelations—and a luminous new world she invites us all to share.
Author: Helen A. Berger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812219715
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Witchcraft and Magic Contemporary North America Edited by Helen A. Berger Magic, always part of the occult underground in North America, has experienced a resurgence since the 1960s. Although most contemporary magical religions have come from abroad, they have found fertile ground in which to develop in North America. Who are today's believers in Witchcraft and how do they worship? Alternative spiritual paths have increased the ranks of followers dramatically, particularly among well-educated middle-class individuals. Witchcraft and Magic conveys the richness of magical religious experiences found in today's culture, covering the continent of North America and the Caribbean. These original essays survey current and historical issues pertinent to religions that incorporate magical or occult beliefs and practices, and they examine contemporary responses to these religions. The relationship between Witchcraft and Neopaganism is explored, as is their intersection with established groups practicing goddess worship. Recent years have seen the growth in New Age magic and Afro-Caribbean religions, and these developments are also addressed in this volume. All the religions covered offer adherents an alternative worldview and rituals that are aimed at helping individuals redefine themselves and make their interactions with the environment more empowered. Many modern occult religions share an absence of dogma or central authority to determine orthodoxy, and have become a contemporary experience embracing modern concerns like feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and gay rights. Afro-Caribbean religions such as Santería, Palo, and Curanderismo, which do have a more developed dogma and authority structure, offer their followers a religion steeped in African and Hispanic traditions. Responses to the growth of magical religions have varied, from acceptance to an unfounded concern about the growth of a satanic underground. And, as magical religions have flourished, increased interest has resulted in a growing commercialization, with its threat of trivialization. Helen A. Berger is Professor of Sociology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. 2005 216 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3877-8 Cloth $49.95s £32.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-1971-5 Paper $24.95s £16.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0125-3 Ebook $24.95s £16.50 World Rights Anthropology, Religion Short copy: In original essays the book explores both religions that incorporate magical or occult beliefs and practices and contemporary responses to these religions in North America and the Caribbean.
Author: Isaac Bonewits
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
ISBN: 0738711993
Category : Neopaganism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
A practical guidebook for creating and conducting public rituals that that unify, inspire and fulfil their intended purposes.
Author: Chas Clifton
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759102019
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
A history of wicca and neopaganism in the United States focusing on the post-WW II period.
Author: Alex Mar
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 0374709114
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
"Witches are gathering." When most people hear the word "witches," they think of horror films and Halloween, but to the nearly one million Americans who practice Paganism today, witchcraft is a nature-worshipping, polytheistic, and very real religion. So Alex Mar discovers when she sets out to film a documentary and finds herself drawn deep into the world of present-day magic. Witches of America follows Mar on her immersive five-year trip into the occult, charting modern Paganism from its roots in 1950s England to its current American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world's most influential magical societies. Along the way she takes part in dozens of rituals and becomes involved with a wild array of characters: a government employee who founds a California priesthood dedicated to a Celtic goddess of war; American disciples of Aleister Crowley, whose elaborate ceremonies turn the Catholic mass on its head; second-wave feminist Wiccans who practice a radical separatist witchcraft; a growing "mystery cult" whose initiates trace their rites back to a blind shaman in rural Oregon. This sprawling magical community compels Mar to confront what she believes is possible-or hopes might be. With keen intelligence and wit, Mar illuminates the world of witchcraft while grappling in fresh and unexpected ways with the question underlying every faith: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all? Whether evangelical Christian, Pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives. Sometimes we just find it in unexpected places.
Author: Sabina Magliocco
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812202708
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Taking the reader into the heart of one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America, Sabina Magliocco reveals how the disciplines of anthropology and folklore were fundamental to the early development of Neo-Paganism and the revival of witchcraft. Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness. Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement—how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics. Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America.
Author: David J. Collins, S. J.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 897
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Book Description
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
