The Journal of American Culture
May 12, 2008
Kyle William Bishop
54 citations
With the popular success of the first talkie horror films, Hollywood of the 1930s was anxious to find the next big-screen monster.Surprisingly, the creative efforts of filmmakers lead them not to the usual mythologies of Europe but rather to exotic Caribbean travel literature.Sensational books like William B. Seabrook's The Magic Island of 1929 had begun to draw the American public's attention...
Journal of Religious Ethics
March 1, 2008
Omar Sultan Haque
20 citations
ABSTRACT The Islamic philosophical, mystical, and theological sub‐traditions have each made characteristic assumptions about the human person, including an incorporation of substance dualism in distinctive manners. Advances in the brain sciences of the last half century, which include a widespread acceptance of death as the end of essential brain function, require the abandonment of dualistic...
Spiritus
March 1, 2008
Douglas Burton‐Christie
Lost—Found Douglas Burton-Christie St. Augustine famously described the soul's ultimate meeting with God as a homecoming, a recognition of something known and familiar that has been lost. His uncanny sense of knowing what he was looking for even in the midst of the most intense experience of dislocation is part of what gives the Confessions such evocative power. It captures the strange but...
Configurations
March 1, 2008
Jodie Nicotra
While William James's investigations into paranormal phenomena, mysticism, and the effects of drugs upon consciousness have been typically dismissed or overlooked by scholars, they actually prove to be consistent with his more reputable philosophical claims about pluralism, radical empiricism, and the role and purpose of science. James's self-experiments with nitrous oxide and other drugs...
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
March 1, 2008
Bernard Mcginn
Much of the recent literature on mysticism has taken mystical experience as a central theme. The term itself is not only recent, but also involves complexities both of a theoretical and historical character. The proposal advanced here is that mystical consciousness, understood as the meta-conscious co-presence of God in the entire process of experiencing, understanding, affirming, loving, and...
Empirical Studies of the Arts
2008
Ken Stange, Shelley E. Taylor
Subjective experiences of profound religious-mystical and aesthetic experiences share common characteristics, suggesting that apparent differences between them may reflect a person's individual cognitive schema. Six characteristics common to descriptions of religious-mystical and aesthetic experiences were distinguished. A questionnaire was designed to determine the following: 1) the extent to...
2008
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
29 citations
in: Wouter J. Hanegraaff & Jeffrey J. Kripal (eds.), Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, Brill: Leiden / Boston 2008 [U.S. Paperback edition: Fordham University Press: New York 2011, 175-207.
Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part A
2008
Michael Witthöft, Fred Rist, Josef Bailer
Absorption as a personality trait refers to the predisposition to get deeply immersed in sensory (e.g., smells, sounds, pictures) or mystical experiences, that is, to experience altered states of consciousness. Absorption is markedly related to constructs openness to experiences, hypnotic suggestibility, imagination, and dissociation. Although absorption was hypothesized to be a risk factor for...
James Joyce quarterly
2008
Mark S Morrisson
3 citations
This article argues that Joyce's engagements with the Theosophy of the Dublin literary world amount to more than simple parody. In Ulysses, Joyce portrays Theosophy's efforts to offer an alternative understanding of physiology to that of the medical establishment as a form of boundary work, an adaptation of the discourse of modern medical research to fashion modern mysticism as a science....
Explore
2008
Jeff Levin
38 citations
This paper presents, for the first time, a comprehensive scholarly examination of the history and principles of major traditions of esoteric healing. After a brief conceptual overview of esoteric religion and healing, summaries are provided of eight major esoteric traditions, including descriptions of beliefs and practices related to health, healing, and medicine. These include what are termed...