Although many of the essays in this book are exceptional, I find David Feltmate's contribution noteworthy.He addresses the scholarly economic and political problems of studying religion and film and television in today's professorship economy and why he still finds meaning in studying film and television through religious studies.The rest of this volume remains impressive, and it will certainly...
McCullough is an assistant professor of practical theology and spiritual care at the University of Toronto. He offers a detailed and engaging study that connects early modern mysticism with the foundations of modern psychotherapy. By positioning the seventeenth-century German philosopher and Christian mystic, Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) within a longer intellectual lineage reaching back to Saint...
The book Divine Knowledge in the Mystical and Sadraean Tradition by Seyyed Ahmad Ghaffari Qarabagh is a profound and systematic study of one of the most intricate theological and philosophical topics in Islamic thought: divine knowledge. The author adopts a comparative approach, examining and contrasting the perspectives of Islamic mysticism (particularly Ibn ʿArabī and his followers) and Mullā...
Gearin, an Australian medical anthropologist, specializes in the globalization of psychedelics and intercultural ethics in medical tourism. He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Queensland in 2015 and has conducted fieldwork in Australia, Peru, and China. Global Ayahuasca represents a culmination of his ethnographic research, offering a comparative analysis of ayahuasca's...
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. xv + 426. Paper $32.50. “In the MRI I experienced the invisible tendrils of discourse…a particularly powerful construction of the social. For in the MRI I became aware of my paranoia, mindful of how theories of information, feedback, and self-organization…frame the social as comprised of discrete individuals in a giant communication machine” (20)....
In recent decades, the study of new religious movements and contemporary forms of esotericism evolved to become an important aspect within the study of religion.1 This is all the more true when we add gender to the mix. Indeed, as argued by Ursula King, “without the incisive, critical application of the category of gender it is no longer possible to accurately describe, analyze or explain any...
The Theosophical Society (est. 1875 in New York by H. P. Blavatsky, H. S. Olcott, and others) is increasingly becoming recognized for its influential role in shaping the alternative new religious and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and perhaps especially for being an early promoter of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies. Many scholars now point to...
Book synopsis: Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams situates the life and fiction of the Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Aren Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams’s seven novels...