Other Worlds

This collection of 25 essays of literary criticism includes pieces on British poet John Milton, British fantasy writer C. S. Lewis, American horror writer Stephen King, American SF and fantasy writer Orson Scott Card, British horror writer Clive Barker, and several others. Complete with bibliography and index.

When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies – deconstruction, Marxism and feminism – Spivak turns this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture, thus ensuring that In Other Worlds has become a valuable tool for studying our own and other worlds of culture.

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains. He asks how changes in the structure of the drama relate to changes in the structure of the theatre, and changes in the role of the audience. Detailed interpretations of plays by Pinero, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter question principles about the modern theatre and establish links between drama structure and theatre structure, theme, and performance space.

Inge van Rij's book demonstrates how Berlioz used the sights and sounds of the orchestra to explore other worlds.

The Vaqueiros de Alzada, a cattle-herding people in the Asturian mountains of Spain, have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe—and an attitude toward death that gives this statistic unusual meaning. This World, Other Worlds considers death among the Vaqueiros as a central cultural fact which reveals local ideas about the origin and destiny of humans, the relations of humans and animals, the configuration of the universe, and the nature of society. Interested chiefly in the conceptual and meaningful aspects of death, María Cátedra focuses on the cultural resources with which the Vaqueiros confront their own mortality—how they experience death and what this reveals about the way they see this world and other worlds. Applying sensitive ethnographic insight to a rich body of oral testimony, Cátedra discloses an unsuspected symbolic universe native to the Vaqueiros. Death is seen here in close, coherent relation to pain, age, and suffering; sickness and suicide, one must understand the cultural valuation of different ways of dying and the conditions under which suicides take place. To understand what it means to be a Vaqueiro is to understand how suicide can be perceived by a people as acceptable. A groundbreaking work in European ethnography, This World, Other Worlds takes symbolic analysis to a new level. In its illumination of local conceptions of death, grace, and sainthood, the book also makes a substantial contribution to the anthropology of religion.

Leading Anglican writers from around the world challenge the assumption that the communion is split between a liberal 'north' and an orthodox 'south'. Anglican churches worldwide are sharply divided on homosexuality. The dominant stereotype is that of a "global south" unanimously lined up against homosexuality as immoral and sinful, and of a liberal and decadent global north. The differences between the two sides are seen as fundamental, and irreconcilable. Nothing is further from the truth: homosexual behavior exists across the whole Anglican Communion, whether it is openly celebrated or quietly integrated into local churches and cultures. In this extraordinary book, in development for several years, this is exposed as a myth. Christians throughout Africa, Asia, and the developing world - bishops, priests and religious, academics and lay writers - open up dramatic new perspectives on familiar arguments and debates. Topics include biblical interpretation, sexuality and doctrine, local history, sexuality and personhood, the influence of other faiths, issues of colonialism and post-colonialism, homophobia, and the place of homosexual persons in the church. Other Voices, Other Worlds reveals the rich historical and cross-cultural complexity to same-sex relationships, and injects dramatic new perspectives into a debate that has become stale and predictable.

Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation. Shape-shifting also belongs in the landscape of magic, witchcraft, and wonder, and enlivens classical mythology, early modern fairy tales and uncanny fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of essays, given as the Clarendon Lectures in English 2001, takes four dominant processes of metamorphosis: Mutating, Hatching, Splitting, and Doubling, and explores their metaphorical power in the evication of human personality. Marina Warner traces this story against a background of historical encounters with different cultures, especially with the Caribbean. Beginning with Ovid's great poem, The Metamorphoses, as the founding text of the metamorphic tradition, she takes us on a journey of exploration, into the fantastic art of Hieronymous Bosch, the legends of the Taino people, the life cycle of the butterfly, the myth of Leda and the Swan, the genealogy of the Zombie, the pantomime of Aladdin, the haunting of doppelgangers, the coming of photography, and the late fiction of Lewis Carroll.

Does consciousness survive the death of the physical body? Are there are a wide variety of entities on the spiritual planes? Find out for yourself by learning how to contact and communicate with spirits using the techniques you will find in Raymond Buckland's Doors to Other Worlds. You'll learn numerous methods of communicating with spirits, including spirit guides and guardian angels. You will learn how to develop your own psychic abilities and even how to become a medium yourself. You will learn the secrets of scrying, clairvoyance, table tipping, using a Ouija board, and automatic writing. Read about the history and development of mediumship, Spiritualism, and channeling. You'll find out what they are, how they are related, how they are similar, and how they are different. Discover the secrets of spirit photography, the practice of taking pictures of non-physical entities. Find out about the best type of film to use, how to set up the camera, and how to experiment with this system. You will even learn how to take spirit photographs without using a camera! One of the most valuable things you can learn is how to heal yourself and others. Ray Buckland explains how diseases begin in the spiritual, or astral, body. Discover how the techniques you have learned in this book can help you to heal others and yourself. This can come from energy work performed on the astral plane or, like the famous medium Edgar Cayce, receiving instructions from the spirit plane for specific cures and treatments. This is a book that has it all. Now is the time to start on your development for tomorrow, and it begins with Doors to Other Worlds. Does consciousness survive the death of the physical body? Are there are a wide variety of entities on the spiritual planes? Find out for yourself by learning how to contact and communicate with spirits using the techniques you will find in Raymond Buckland's Doors to Other Worlds. You'll learn numerous methods of communicating with spirits, including spirit guides and guardian angels. You will learn how to develop your own psychic abilities and even how to become a medium yourself. You will learn the secrets of scrying, clairvoyance, table tipping, using a Ouija board, and automatic writing. Read about the history and development of mediumship, Spiritualism, and channeling. You'll find out what they are, how they are related, how they are similar, and how they are different. Discover the secrets of spirit photography, the practice of taking pictures of non-physical entities. Find out about the best type of film to use, how to set up the camera, and how to experiment with this system. You will even learn how to take spirit photographs without using a camera! One of the most valuable things you can learn is how to heal yourself and others. Ray Buckland explains how diseases begin in the spiritual, or astral, body. Discover how the techniques you have learned in this book can help you to heal others and yourself. This can come from energy work performed on the astral plane or, like the famous medium Edgar Cayce, receiving instructions from the spirit plane for specific cures and treatments. This is a book that has it all. Now is the time to start on your development for tomorrow, and it begins with Doors to Other Worlds.

Challenging the assumption that the biblical text is absolutist, this study renders the wall of division between Christian absolutism and cultural relativism indefensible. Its encouraging argument draws upon sociology, anthropology, and analysis of the biblical text.

Zac is a smart, athletic, twelve-year-old who enjoys life, having fun, spending time with his friends, and especially playing baseball. His world turns topsy-turvy one spring break when his dreams begin. The dreams are so real, hes not sure if hes dreaming or actually traveling to these unusual places. After one dream, he wakes up with black-and-blue marks on his arms. Could they possibly be from the pirate he ran into during his dream? Zacs discoveries leave him knowing hes involved in a very serious fight for leadership between the aliens, the Mayans, and the current world as he knows it. Zac finds out hes a descendant of the Mayans, but theres no one to ask about how to deal with his unique capabilities. Hes on his own; he doesnt have a clue how to address the issues and save his family and his world. When his mother gives him a book, handed down through the generations and not opened for more than one hundred years, it may help him through these struggles. Or does it just make the situation more confusing?

Eleven-year-old Jack Carter begins sixth grade at a new school. He’s more intelligent than other kids his age, but his grades are far from perfect. Jack suffers from headaches and strange dreams, but he keeps these things secret, even from his mom. In the dreams, someone calls to him, but Jack doesn’t know who or why. An extra severe headache lands Jack in the hospital, which is when his life flips upside-down. He wakes wearing a strange necklace and receives a warning that he must escape the hospital immediately. The reality Jack knew has disappeared, replaced with a strange world of magic and dragons. With no time to adjust, Jack is tasked with restoring the four towers that balance the universe. Using his intelligence and strength, Jack faces incredible obstacles he never could have imagined. Along the way, he discovers who he is and his true purpose, all while saving his home from certain destruction.

David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made significant contributions to almost every area of analytic philosophy including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, and set the agenda for various debates in these areas which carry on to this day. In several respects he remains a contemporary figure, yet enough time has now passed for historians of philosophy to begin to study his place in twentieth century thought. His philosophy was constructed and refined not just through his published writing, but also crucially through his life-long correspondence with fellow philosophers, including leading figures such as D.M. Armstrong, Saul Kripke, W.V. Quine, J.J.C. Smart, and Peter van Inwagen. His letters formed the undercurrent of his published work and became the medium through which he proposed many of his well-known theories and discussed a range of philosophical topics in depth. A selection of his vast correspondence over a 40-year period is presented here across two volumes. As metaphysics is arguably where Lewis made his greatest contribution, this forms the focus of Volume 1. Arranged under the broad areas of Causation, Modality, and Ontology, the letters offer an organic story of the origins, development, breadth, and depth of his metaphysics in its historical context, as well as a glimpse into the influence of his many interlocutors. This volume will be an indispensable resource for contemporary metaphysics and for those interested in the Lewisian perspective.

A comprehensive exploration of chemically mediated extra ordinary human experiences. Scientist and psychonaut David Luke weaves personal experience and scientific research to create Otherworlds - Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience. “Emphasizing parapsychological aspects of the psychedelic experience, Luke’s new book fills in a fascinating and previously neglected lacuna in the burgeoning field of human studies with these compounds. ” – Rick Strassman, PhD “A psychedelic Indiana Jones. ” – Matt Colborn, PhD “David Luke’s delightful one-liner about his book is that it’s ‘about weird people in weird places taking weird substances doing weird things and, importantly, having weird experiences’ . . . On reflection, it’s much more profound than that . . . So weird reader, forge ahead without fear. ” – Dean Radin, PhD “In his fascinating book David plunges into this controversial topic and gives the backstory, the front story, and possible ways forward to bring paranormal and psychedelic research together, and further our understanding of both. ” – Dennis J. McKenna, PhD “A remarkable collection and a necessary one. This body of research illuminates aspects of psychedelic experiences usually obscured or denied in the medical and clinical research and sensationalized in the popular press. ” – James Fadiman, PhD “A real Dr Gonzo. ” – Will Self

The Gettier Problem has shaped most of the fundamental debates in epistemology for more than fifty years. Before Edmund Gettier published his famous 1963 paper, it was generally presumed that knowledge was equivalent to true belief supported by adequate evidence. Gettier presented a powerful challenge to that presumption. This led to the development and refinement of many prominent epistemological theories, for example, defeasibility theories, causal theories, conclusive-reasons theories, tracking theories, epistemic virtue theories, and knowledge-first theories. The debate about the appropriate use of intuition to provide evidence in all areas of philosophy began as a debate about the epistemic status of the 'Gettier intuition'. The differing accounts of epistemic luck are all rooted in responses to the Gettier Problem. The discussions about the role of false beliefs in the production of knowledge are directly traceable to Gettier's paper, as are the debates between fallibilists and infallibilists. Indeed, it is fair to say that providing a satisfactory response to the Gettier Problem has become a litmus test of any adequate account of knowledge even those accounts that hold that the Gettier Problem rests on mistakes of various sorts. This volume presents a collection of essays by twenty-six experts, including some of the most influential philosophers of our time, on the various issues that arise from Gettier's challenge to the analysis of knowledge. Explaining Knowledge sets the agenda for future work on the central problem of epistemology.

The Other World, Fourth Edition, is designed to give students an overview of contemporary issues in the developing world. Using an engaging and informative interdisciplinary approach, it provides students with fundamental information on current problems common to developing areas. The text presents regional coverage of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The authors describe the similarities and differences among nations within these regions and trace events and issues in selected countries in each region.