A Spiritual Bloomsbury

A Spiritual Bloomsbury
Author: Antony R. H. Copley
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780739114650

A Spiritual Bloomsbury is an exploration of how three English writers--Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood--sought to come to terms with their homosexuality by engagement with Hinduism. Copley reveals how these writers came to terms with their inner conflicts and were led in the direction of Hinduism by friendship or the influence of gurus. Tackling the themes of the guru-disciple relationship, their quarrel with Christianity, relationships with their mothers and the problematic feminine, the tensions between sexuality and society, and the attraction of Hindu mysticism; this fascinating work seeks to reveal whether Hinduism offered the answers and fulfillment these writers ultimately sought. Also included is a diary narrating Copley's quest to track down Carpenter's and Isherwood's Vendantism and Forster's Krishna cult on a journey to India.

Spiritual Tourism

Spiritual Tourism
Author: Alex Norman
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1441150447

First volume exploring spiritual tourism as a phenomenon in Western cultures of travel, discussing the relationship between contemporary tourism and secular approaches to religious practices.

The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements

The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements
Author: George D. Chryssides
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2014-01-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1441198296

The Bloomsbury Companion to New Religious Movements covers key themes such as charismatic leadership, conversion and brainwashing, prophecy and millennialism, violence and suicide, gender and sexuality, legal issues, and the portrayal of New Religious Movements by the media and anti-cult organisations. Several categories of new religions receive special attention, including African new religions, Japanese new religions, Mormons, and UFO religions. This guide to New Religious Movements and their critical study brings together 29 world-class international scholars, and serves as a resource to students and researchers. The volume highlights the current state of academic study in the field, and explores areas in which future research might develop. Clearly and accessibly organised to help users quickly locate key information and analysis, the book includes an A to Z of key terms, extensive guides to further resources, a comprehensive bibliography, and a timeline of major developments in the field such as the emergence of new groups, publications, legal decisions, and historical events.

Water: A Spiritual History

Water: A Spiritual History
Author: Ian Bradley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2012-11-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1441167676

Water has long been associated with the magical, the mysterious and the divine. From sacred springs to holy wells, and from hydropathic cures and temperance reform to the modern spa, Ian Bradley explores how water's creative, health-giving and restorative powers have been conceived, worshipped and marketed in an essentially spiritual way. In pre-Christian times, springs and rivers were seen as the dwelling places of deities with magical life-giving and curative powers, associated especially with the feminine and with ritual cleansing and rebirth. With the coming of Christianity, water was incorporated into Christian ritual and tradition through baptism and the cult of holy wells. From the 16th century onwards, the benefits of water came to be seen more in terms of therapeutic healing than the miraculous. Through the development of drinking and bathing cures, spas and hydrotherapy, a more scientific but still essentially spiritual understanding of the curative properties of water was developed. By the eighteenth century, spas and watering places had acquired their own enchanted and mysterious qualities, in many ways taking the place of medieval pilgrim shrines. Now, a new, more hedonistic kind of pilgrim comes to modern spas to experience a potent post-modern elixir of self-oriented well-being.

American Bloomsbury

American Bloomsbury
Author: Susan Cheever
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2007-09-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0743264622

A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.

Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State

Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State
Author: Joanne Punzo Waghorne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 135008655X

This book examines spirituality in Singapore, showing how important the city state is for understanding contemporary global configurations of urban space, religion, and spirituality. Joanne Punzo Waghorne highlights how the formal religious spaces-temples, churches, and mosques-have been confined to allotted sites on the map of Singapore, whereas various “spiritual” organizations, particularly of Hindu origins and headed by a guru, still continue to operate as “societies” classified by the government with other “clubs.” These unconventional religiosities are not confined but ironically make their own places, meeting in ostensive secular venues: high-rise flats, malls, businesses, and community centers, thus existing in the overall space of religion, commerce, and the state. The book argues that State of Singapore also operates between the secular and the religious, constructing an overarching spatial regime that both accommodates and yet rivals the alternate spheres that spiritual movements construct under its umbrella. Both spatial configurations challenge the presumed relationships between myth and reality, religion and commerce, the ethereal and the concrete, the sacred and the secular, on the levels of self, community, and polity. Singapore, now deemed a model for urban development in Asia, also offers an understanding of a new post-secularity and perhaps reveals where the urbanized world is headed.

Cinematic Ghosts

Cinematic Ghosts
Author: Murray Leeder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1628922168

In 1896, Maxim Gorky declared cinema "the Kingdom of Shadows." In its silent, ashen-grey world, he saw a land of spectral, and ever since then cinema has had a special relationship with the haunted and the ghostly. Cinematic Ghosts is the first collection devoted to this subject, including fourteen new essays, dedicated to exploring the many permutations of the movies' phantoms. Cinematic Ghosts contains essays revisiting some classic ghost films within the genres of horror (The Haunting, 1963), romance (Portrait of Jennie, 1948), comedy (Beetlejuice, 1988) and the art film (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), as well as essays dealing with a number of films from around the world, from Sweden to China. Cinematic Ghosts traces the archetype of the cinematic ghost from the silent era until today, offering analyses from a range of historical, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions.

The Interpreting Spirit

The Interpreting Spirit
Author: Hannah R. K. Mather
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2020-10-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725273187

The Interpreting Spirit is both a consideration of the Spirit’s role in the interpretation of Scripture and a celebration of renewal scholarship. It examines those who have focused on the Spirit’s role in their hermeneutical considerations, recognizing common, uniting themes amidst the diversity of scholarly approach and opinion. Working on the principle that the Spirit communicates in ways that seek to unify and celebrate the other, Mather works diachronically from 1970, identifying and drawing together these common, uniting hallmarks into a collective understanding. Pivotal to Mather’s argument is her emphasis that we do not just interpret Scripture, but that the Spirit through Scripture, and working in our lives in ways that lead us towards Scripture, interprets us. The Interpreting Spirit is the first comprehensive analysis of the conversation surrounding pneumatic interpretation that has been taking place, particularly among renewal scholars, since 1970. It seeks to answer the notoriously difficult question, “What does the Spirit do in the process of biblical interpretation?”

Shared Secrets

Shared Secrets
Author: Elizabeth Findley Shores
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2021-02-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1682261557

For nearly a century, British expatriate Charles Joseph Finger (1867–1941) was best known as a Newberry-award-winning author of children’s literature. In Shared Secrets, Elizabeth Findley Shores relates Finger’s untold story, exploring the secrets that connected the author to an international community of twentieth-century queer literati. As a young man, Finger reveled in the easy homosociality of his London polytechnical school, where he launched a student literary society in the mold of the city’s private men’s clubs. Throughout his life, as he wandered from England to Patagonia to the United States, he tried to recreate similarly open spaces—such as Gayeta, his would-be art colony in Arkansas. But it was through his idiosyncratic magazine All’s Well that he constructed his most successful social network, writing articles filled with coded signals and winking asides for an inner circle of understanding readers. Shared Secrets is both the story of Finger’s remarkable, adventurous life and a rare look at a community of gay writers and artists who helped shaped twentieth-century American culture, even as they artfully concealed their own identities.

Bloomsbury's Prophet

Bloomsbury's Prophet
Author: Tom Regan
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1620324601

Canonized as the "plain man's philosopher" and the "defender of common sense," G. E. Moore is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. But Moore's role as Bloombury's prophet has remained a mystery. How could the "plain man's philosopher" influence those legendary members of the Bloomsbury group--Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, for example--who could never be characterized as plain men?With this book, well-known contemporary philosopher Tom Regan solves the mystery. Relying on Moore's published and unpublished work, Regan traces the development of Moore's moral philsophy up to and through his seminal work, Principa Ethica (1903). Regan offers a radical reinterpretation of Principa. Contrary to the standard interpretation, that work's central theme is the liberation of the individual, not dreary conformity to the rules of conventional morality. The Bloomsberries lived Moore's philosophy--the same philosophy subsequent generations have misunderstood.At once literary and scholarly, Bloomsbury's Prophet challenges received opinions not only about Principa and Moore but about Bloomsbury itself.