This book employs an explicitly global approach to world regional geography that examines the interconnections between people and places at different scales, and that brings to the introductory learner the most current and powerful ideas in geography. It features an emphasis on core regions, key cities, and distinctive landscapes that allows the authors to stress global connections while still maintaining a traditional focus on places at the local... more...

Debates about the foundations of quantum theory usually circle around two main challenges: the so-called 'measurement problem' and a claimed tension between quantum theory and relativity theory that arises from the phenomena labelled 'quantum non-locality'. This work explores the possibility of a 'therapeutic approach' to these problems that regards them as arising from mistaken conceptual presuppositions and quantum theory as a fully... more...

Academic analyses of religious phenomena have often placed an emphasis on beliefs and ideologies and prioritized the understanding of religious symbols over the material of symbolization. Through the ethnographic analysis of a variety of contemporary religious forms, Making Spirits questions the presumed separation of spirit and matter, and sheds light on the relational dynamics between spiritual and material domains, on the mechanisms... more...

William Ward's account of the Hindu communities among whom he served as a Baptist missionary in Serampore in West Bengal was first published in 1811 and reprinted in this third edition in 1817. It was an extremely influential work that shaped British views of the newly defined entity of 'Hinduism' in the early nineteenth century. Ward and his fellow missionaries promoted social reforms and education, establishing the Serampore Mission Press in 1800 and... more...

“Reality is experience, and experience is reality,” says Hawaiian shaman Serge King, speaking of Huna, the esoteric tradition in which he was reared.King emphasizes that all of us have the ability to shift from one world to another. The difference is that shamans do it purposefully, while the rest of us are unaware of it. He trains us to engage in the process consciously in order to expand our human potential. Among books on Huna,... more...

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This book investigates four religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the Sub-Genius, and Jediism. Utilising contemporary scholarship on secularisation, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores these groups as reactions against the religious marketplace of the 1950s and 1960s. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining... more...

Whereas many textbooks treat the subject of world religions in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power, James W. Laine treats religion and politics as halves of the same whole, tracing their relationship from the policies of Alexander the Great to the ideologies of modern Europe secularists, with stops in classical India, China,... more...