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A Special Illumination: Authority, Inspiration and Heresy in Gay Spirituality
by Rollan McClearyGay spirituality represents a hidden strand in Western thought that was only publically declared from the Gay Liberation of the 1970s. Since "coming out", expressions of gay spirituality have proliferated in both number and diversity. Beginning with gay theology within Christianity, the phenomenon has now reached as far as Buddhism and neo-paganism. But, so far, critical analysis of the movement has been very limited largely because gay spirituality has been treated as a political and social movement arguing for rights and acceptance within religious circles. 'A Special Illumination' offers an indepth analysis and argues that gay spirituality should be placed at the heart of religion.
Special Kay: The Wisdom of Terry Kay
by Terry KayLeft Book Jacket: “Terry Kay is one of the South's most-loved, widely acclaimed, and successful writers. Most known for his best-selling novels, many of his readers are not aware of the astute social observer who rests behind the novelist's veil--at least not yet. Special Kay reveals the essayist, critic, and humorist who has written for a wide array of newspapers and magazines for years. In this collection, Kay captures us at both our best and our worst, all with a Southern accent--including commentary on such wide-ranging topics as advertising, the lottery, self-help books, health insurance reform, professional wrestling, and so much more. A rare treat is Kay's first venture into fiction writing, ‘I Was a Teenage Quarterback,’ and ‘The Strange Dance of the White Dog,’ the story that was the genesis of the popular novel and film. This collection proves that Kay's sense of power in words can be seen not only in his fiction, but in his nonfiction as well.”
A Special Kind of Family
by Eileen BergerA FAMILY FOR VANESSALife in Sylvan Falls was picture-perfect for Vanessa McHenry-until her beloved grandmother broke her hip, leaving five troubled teens in Vanessa’s care. Vanessa struggled to balance her job with her new family, but without helpful neighbors she didn’t have a prayer....A LITTLE FAITH AND A LOT OF LOVERob Corland knew he was taking a chance that his heart would break a second time when he offered Vanessa a supportive hand. Yet Rob was determined to show Vanessa she was deserving of love. And he was praying that he’d be able to open her heart.
Special Religious Education in Australia and its Value to Contemporary Society
by Zehavit Gross Suzanne D. RutlandThis book explores the advantages of and challenges concerning Special Religious Education (SRE) in multicultural Australia and argues for the need for General Religious Education (GRE) as well. Through the lens of the most recent scholarship, and drawing on an in-depth qualitative study and specific case studies, the book examines the current debate on the role of religious education within government schools. It addresses key concepts of values education, spirituality, health and wellbeing, and cultural and religious identity. It analyses why it is important to retain SRE, together with GRE, as government policy. It explores highly relevant, controversial and contested issues regarding SRE, including the 30% of Australia’s population who declare themselves as having “no religion”, and brings fresh insights to the table. While secularization has increased in both the national and international spheres, there has also been an increase in fundamentalism within religious beliefs. Events such as the September 11 terror attacks and the more recent mass shootings by white supremacists and eco-fascists in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Pittsburgh and San Diego in the USA are reminders that religion is still a major actor in the twenty-first century. This poses new challenges for the relationship between church and state, and demonstrates the need to revisit the role of religious education within government schools. While the importance of GRE is generally acknowledged, SRE has increasingly come under attack by some researchers and teacher and parent bodies as being inappropriate and contradictory to the values of the postmodern world. On the other hand, the key stakeholders from all the faith traditions in Australia wish to retain the SRE classes in government schools. The book addresses this burning issue, and shows that it is relevant not only for Australia but also globally.
A Spectacle of Glory: God's Light Shining through Me Every Day
by Joni Eareckson Tada Larry LibbyDo you ever wonder why God created you? The Bible spells it out plainly: God created you to showcase His glory—to enjoy it, display it, and demonstrate it every day to all those you encounter. After nearly 50 years of living as a quadriplegic, and dealing with chronic pain on a daily basis, Joni has learned firsthand the importance of glorifying God through the toughest of situations. Through this devotional, Joni will help you discover how to put God’s glory on display—how to say no to complaining and say yes to daily following God down even the most difficult paths. Along the way, you will find great comfort and encouragement by focusing on the one who longs to lead and guide you every step of the way, every day. Don’t ever think your life is too ordinary, your world too small, or your work too insignificant. All of it is a stage set for you to glorify God.
The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in the Contemporary Turkish Cinema
by Ebru Thwaites DikenThis book explores how politics, religion and cinema encounter and re-invent each other in contemporary Turkish cinema. It investigates their common origin—the spectacle, which each field views as an instrument of governmentality. The book analyses six recent, some of which are internationally known Turkish films: The Messenger (Ulak), A Man’s Fear of God (Takva), Let’s Sin (İtirazım Var), SixtyOne Days (İftarlık Gazoz), The Imam and The Shadowless (Gölgesizler). Thwaites discusses how the cinematic nature of politics and religion unfold amidst the increasing media visibility of religion in contemporary Turkey. The chapters explore the relationship between art and religion, and compare religion and philosophy in their relation to truth, belief, and economy. Through close examination of these films, the author highlights the role of cinema in contemporary Turkey and at the heart of the religious paradigm.
Spectacles of Empire
by Christopher A. FrilingosThe book of Revelation presents a daunting picture of the destruction of the world, complete with clashing gods, a multiheaded beast, armies of heaven, and the final judgment of mankind. The bizarre conclusion to the New Testament is routinely cited as an example of the early Christian renunciation of the might and values of Rome. But Christopher A. Frilingos contends that Revelation's relationship to its ancient environment was a rather more complex one. In Spectacles of Empire he argues that the public displays of the Roman Empire--the games of the arena, the execution of criminals, the civic veneration of the emperor--offer a plausible context for reading Revelation. Like the spectacles that attracted audiences from one end of the Mediterranean Sea to the other, Revelation shares a preoccupation with matters of spectatorship, domination, and masculinity.Scholars have long noted that in promising a complete reversal of fortune to an oppressed minority, Revelation has provided inspiration to Christians of all kinds, from liberation theologians protesting globalization to the medieval Apostolic Brethren facing death at the stake. But Frilingos approaches the Apocalypse from a different angle, arguing that Revelation was not merely a rejection of the Roman world in favor of a Christian one; rather, its visions of monsters and martyrs were the product of an empire whose subjects were trained to dominate the threatening "other." By comparing images in Revelation to those in other Roman-era literature, such as Greek romances and martyr accounts, Frilingos reveals a society preoccupied with seeing and being seen. At the same time, he shows how Revelation calls attention to both the risk and the allure of taking in a show in a society which emphasized the careful scrutiny of one's friends, enemies, and self. Ancient spectators, Frilingos notes, whether seated in an arena or standing at a distance as Babylon burned, frequently discovered that they themselves had become part of the performance.
A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
by Paul HanebrinkIn the 20th century, Europe was haunted by a specter of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. Fear of a Jewish Bolshevik plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and spread across the continent. Paul Hanebrink shows that the myth of ethno-religious threat is still alive today, in Westerners’ fear of Muslims.
The Specter of Hypocrisy: Testing the Limits of Moral Discourse
by Raphael SassowerRaphael Sassower examines the concept of hypocrisy for its strategic potential as a means of personal protection and social cohesion. Given the contemporary context of post-truth, the examination of degrees or kinds of hypocrisy moves from the Greek etymology of masks worn on the theater stage to the Hebrew etymology of the color adjustment of chameleons to their environment. Canonical presuppositions about the uniformity of the mind and the relation between intention and behavior that warrant the charge of hypocrisy are critically reconsidered in order to appreciate both inherent inconsistencies in personal conduct and the different contexts where the hypocrisy appears. Sassower considers the limits of analytic moral and political discourses that at times overlook the conditions under which putative hypocritical behavior is existentially required and where compromises yield positive results. When used among friends, the charge of hypocrisy is a useful tool with which to build trust and communities.
The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch
by Ari FinkelsteinIn the generation after Constantine the Great elevated Christianity to a dominant position in the Roman Empire, his nephew, the Emperor Julian, sought to reinstate the old gods to their former place of prominence—in the face of intense opposition from the newly powerful Christian church. In early 363 c.e., while living in Syrian Antioch, Julian redoubled his efforts to hellenize the Roman Empire by turning to an unlikely source: the Jews. With a war against Persia on the horizon, Julian thought it crucial that all Romans propitiate the true gods and gain their favor through proper practice. To convince his people, he drew on Jews, whom he characterized as Judeans, using their scriptures, institutions, practices, and heroes sometimes as sources for his program and often as models to emulate. In The Specter of the Jews, Ari Finkelstein examines Julian’s writings and views on Jews as Judeans, a venerable group whose religious practices and values would help delegitimize Christianity and, surprisingly, shape a new imperial Hellenic pagan identity.
Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination
by John D. CaputoIn Specters of God, John D. Caputo returns to the original impulse of his work, the "mystical element" in things, here under the name of an "anxious apophatics," as distinct from an "edifying apophatics" anchored in unity with God. In dialogue with Schelling, a new turn for him and the lynchpin of this argument, Caputo addresses the nocturnal powers in being, the specters that haunt our being and bring us up short. The result is an erudite and insightful analysis—in his usual lively and masterful style—of several key "spectral" figures from medieval angelology and Eckhart's Gottheit, through Luther's deus absconditus and Schelling's "Satanology," to the spectralization and virtualization of the world in the "posthuman" age. Arguing that the name of God is not the master name of a super-being who is going to save us but a placeholder for sources deep in our apophatic imaginary, he asks, Has "God" become a (holy) ghost of the past? A passing spectral effect of the ancient harmonies of the spheres? Does radical thinking culminate in a cosmopoetics beyond theism and its theology, in a doxology to the transient glory of the world, whatever it was in the beginning, however eerie its end, world without why?
The Spectrum of Consciousness
by Ken WilberWilber's groundbreaking synthesis of religion, philosophy, physics, and psychology started a revolution in transpersonal psychology. He was the first to suggest in a systematic way that the great psychological systems of the West could be integrated with the noble contemplative traditions of the East. Spectrum of Consciousness, first released by Quest in 1977, has been the prominent reference point for all subsequent attempts at integrating psychology and spirituality.
Spectrum of Ecstasy: The Five Wisdom Emotions According to Vajrayana Buddhism
by Ngakpa Chogyam Khandro DechenHere two Western-born lamas of the Nyingma tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism explore what it means to be utterly emotionally alive. Written in contemporary, nonacademic language, this book is a radical challenge to the misconception that inner Vajrayana is primarily an esoteric system of ritual and liturgy. The authors teach that emotions can be embraced as a rich and profound opportunity for realization. This fiercely compassionate battle cry rallies all who are audacious enough to appreciate emotions for their supreme potential as vehicles for awakening.
Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
by Adam S. MillerThis book offers a novel account of grace framed in terms of Bruno Latour’s “principle of irreduction.” It thus models an object-oriented approach to grace, experimentally moving a traditional Christian understanding of grace out of a top-down, theistic ontology and into an agent-based, object-oriented ontology. In the process, it also provides a systematic and original account of Latour’s overall project.The account of grace offered here redistributes the tasks assigned to science and religion. Where now the work of science is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant, and too transcendent to be visible, the business of religion is to bring into focus objects that are too near, too available, and too immanent to be visible. Where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our nearsightedness, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our farsightedness. Speculative Grace remaps the meaning of grace and examines the kinds of religious instruments and practices that, as a result, take center stage.
Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion (Routledge Advances in Television Studies)
by Gregory EricksonThis book explores the concept that, as participation in traditional religion declines, the complex and fantastical worlds of speculative television have become the place where theological questions and issues are negotiated, understood, and formed. From bodies, robots, and souls to purgatories and post-apocalyptic scenarios and new forms of digital scripture, the shows examined – from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Westworld – invite their viewers and fans to engage with and imagine concepts traditionally reserved for religious spaces. Informed by recent trends in both fan studies and religious studies, and with an emphasis on practice as well as belief, the thematically focused narrative posits that it is through the intersections of these shows that we find the reframing and rethinking of religious ideas. This truly interdisciplinary work will resonate with scholars and upper-level students in the areas of religion, television studies, popular culture, fan studies, media studies, and philosophy.
Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion (Routledge Advances in Television Studies)
by Gregory EricksonThis book explores the concept that, as participation in traditional religion declines, the complex and fantastical worlds of speculative television have become the place where theological questions and issues are negotiated, understood, and formed.From bodies, robots, and souls to purgatories and post-apocalyptic scenarios and new forms of digital scripture, the shows examined – from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Westworld – invite their viewers and fans to engage with and imagine concepts traditionally reserved for religious spaces. Informed by recent trends in both fan studies and religious studies, and with an emphasis on practice as well as belief, the thematically focused narrative posits that it is through the intersections of these shows that we find the reframing and rethinking of religious ideas.This truly interdisciplinary work will resonate with scholars and upper-level students in the areas of religion, television studies, popular culture, fan studies, media studies, and philosophy.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (Routledge Radical Orthodoxy)
by James K.A. SmithGod is infinite, but language finite; thus speech would seem to condemn Him to finitude. In speaking of God, would the theologian violate divine transcendence by reducing God to immanence, or choose, rather, to remain silent? At stake in this argument is a core problem of the conditions of divine revelation. How, in terms of language and the limitations of human understanding, can transcendence ever be made known? Does its very appearance not undermine its transcendence, its condition of unknowability?Speech and Theology posits that the paradigm for the encounter between the material and the divine, or the immanent and transcendent, is found in the Incarnation: God's voluntary self-immersion in the human world as an expression of His love for His creation. By this key act of grace, hinged upon Christs condescension to human finitude, philosophy acquires the means not simply to speak of perfection, which is to speak theologically, but to bridge the gap between word and thing in general sense.
Speech Communication: A Redemptive Introduction
by Donald H. AlbanSpeech Communication helps Christian college student develop a Biblical understanding of communication and challenges them to apply it to their intended occupations in a way that makes a redemptive difference in the world. It introduces Christian students to public speaking as a mode through which they can engage people in a way that advances what God values.
The Speech Of The Grail
by Linda SussmanThe Author begins with a beautiful retelling of the story, allowing readers to inwardly reproduce the potent inner images of the text. Then she shows that it is not so much a path toward perfection as a recovery of the proper relationship with our own imperfections. She shows, too, that it is a path in which male and female aspects work together to overcome evil.
The Speed of Favor: How God Exceeds, Increases, and Accelerates Your Life
by Tim HillThe end times could be the beginning of your greatest blessing. Rather than Christians living in fear of what&’s to come, Tim Hill invites them to move to a new level of trust and confidence in God and a higher level of faith and expectation as they discover the accelerated season of favor God has promised for the days ahead. Flying in the face of the doomsayers who forecast the demise of the church, Hill recovers an ancient prophetic promise of provision. Sharing how this revelation affected his own family, finances, and faith, Hill challenges readers to break free from a powerless, status-quo Christian life filled with anxiety, depression, and hopelessness as they discover how God&’s blessings and provision precede them and enable them to make a difference in others&’ lives. The Amos 9:13 promise is not about prosperity. Neither is it a word for just one season. It is a way of life. Hill encourages readers to welcome it, embrace it, and claim it as their own. &“Yes indeed, it won&’t be long now.&” God&’s Decree. &“Things are going to happen so fast your head will swim, one thing fast on the heels of the other. You won&’t be able to keep up. Everything will be happening at once—and everywhere you look, blessings! Blessings like wine pouring off the mountains and hills.&” —Amos 9:13, The Message
Speed Trap
by Patricia DavidsUSA Today–Bestselling Author: A Kansas sheriff saves a baby’s life, but she’s unsure whether to view the boy’s father with sympathy or suspicion . . .The fatal crash was no accident. The killer’s only mistake was leaving behind a survivor . . . a four-month-old boy. For his sake—and for his murdered mother’s—Sheriff Mandy Scott will see justice served. And she already has her prime suspect: the boy’s father, Garrett Bowen.Yet despite the evidence against him, something about the reclusive rancher makes Mandy question his guilt. Nothing is as it seems as crime starts spiraling out of control in Timber Wells. If Mandy lets herself trust Garrett, will he shield her from danger, or send her racing into another lethal trap?
The Spell (Forbidden Doors, #3)
by Bill MyersThe Society is determined: Becka must pay for all she has done. And so they begin a scare campaign, complete with spells and curses. But the campaign quickly gets out of hand. Before she knows what's happening, Becka finds herself in grave danger. There is only one thing that will save Becka, but she has to find it herself... lurk ahead. Join Becka and Scott as they learn valuable truths about the lure of the supernatural, the reality of spiritual warfare--and the truth of victory in Jesus. Ouija boards, witchcraft, voodoo, vampires and more are covered in these edge-of-your-seat thrillers for teens. Recommended for ages 12 and up.
A Spell a Day: For Health, Wealth, Love, and More
by Cassandra EasonNeed money? Want more amour? Whatever your hearts desire, Cassandra Eason has a spell for it. Her fun, comprehensive compendium takes you through the year, with just the right magic to help make you prosperous, lucky, loved, and full of life. With its easy-to-use instructions and engaging, accessible design, its a must for anyone hoping to make dreams come true.
The Spell Book for New Witches: Essential Spells to Change Your Life
by Ambrosia HawthornUnlock your magic with simple spells for new witchesThere's magic in all of us, just waiting to be tapped. If you're ready to access and channel your power, The Spell Book for New Witches will be your guide. Inside, you'll learn what it means to create and cast a spell, the central philosophies of witchcraft, and how spellwork can help you feel more powerful and connected to the world around you.The Spell Book for New Witches offers:Guidance for new witches—This beginner witchcraft book is your introduction to spellcasting that covers key terms, the different forms of magic, and step-by-step guidance for successful spells.Love, prosperity, and healing—Try 130 spells that can impact every part of your life, like a Rose Attraction Potion, a Friendship Repair Knot Spell, or Healing Full Moon Water.Helpful instructions and illustrations—Enchanting illustrations and a cookbook-style format make it easy to find your favorite spells, and hone your craft over time.Empower the witch within as you explore the ultimate choice in witch books for beginners.
The Spell of the Crystal Chair (Seven Sleepers: The Lost Chronicles #1)
by Gilbert MorrisThe Dark Lord has been busy, and once again Goel is sending the Seven Sleepers to spoil his plans. This time Josh and his friends are off to Whiteland, a place of sled dogs and igloos, polar bears, and seals. The Sleepers soon learn that Whiteland is also the home of the dreaded ice wraiths, the warlike Yanti people, and a crafty dark-hearted wizard. Then they hear the really scary news: their job is to destroy a special chair deep inside the wizard's palace. But what about the fearsome creature that guards the Crystal Chair? And what about the wizard himself? See what happens when the Sleepers obey Goel, the good leader who always gives his friends just what they need.