A young couple, a religious man, a gritty rapper, and a sublime videographer get stranded together in the desert. Little do they know, they’ll cross paths in a bloody fashion with one another as well as a hippie cult that has a fetish for the flesh. Welcome to the Valley of Fire, where sex magic, psychedelics, ancient tongues, and old gods reign supreme. “God’s Leftovers is not for the faint of heart. This brutal, visceral, shocking work of fiction is Ketchum meets Barker with a sprinkling of classic slashers and grindhouse pulp. If you want to be disgusted and unsettled, tapping into the vibe of films like Martyrs, I Spit on Your Grave, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre—this is your jam. I need to take a shower and douse myself in holy water.”—Richard Thomas, author of Spontaneous Human Combustion and Bram Stoker Award® nominee “If you can picture The Hills Have Eyes imbued with Jodorowsky’s psychedelic sensibilities, you might get something close to God’s Leftovers. With it, Grant Wamack makes a spectacular, bloody entrance into the splatterpunk arena. You’ve gotta read this book!” —Lucas Magnum, author of Gods of the Dark Web “Deadly secrets, psychedelic drugs, sex magic... Wamack knows a thing or two about hard times and in this novella, you see life itself staring back at you, brandishing your worst fears, daring you to turn the page. I’ve been following Grant Wamack’s work for a long time and God’s Leftovers is his calling card, proving he’s at the peak of his powers.” —Michael J. Seidlinger, author of Anybody Home?

A vivid account of ritual, power, and social inequality in rural India.

What happens when we truly put God first in all aspects of our lives? In a culture guided chiefly by shiny, life-promising distractions, “enough” seems elusive and keeps us indebted to that next source of satisfaction. What if the Giver of Life offered freedom from this downward spiral—would you take it? In shiny gods, pastor and author Mike Slaughter, lead pastor of Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church and popular author of Christmas Is Not Your Birthday, helps readers reassess priorities and create a culture and a lifestyle of giving with a special emphasis on missions.

This edited collection provides the latest in research and critical thinking on public health alternatives to conventional criminal approaches aimed at limiting the harms of both legal and illegal drugs for users and society.

The Famished Gods: Speaking Selves in Akkarmashi is a critical reception of the Indian Dalit classical autobiography of Sharankumar Limbale, Akkarmashi, The Outcaste (2003). This book microscopically scrutinizes aspects of penury and destitution for which 'stomach' becomes the metaphor. While centrally focusing on the themes of 'food' and 'hunger', it also undertakes discussions on resistance, identities, atrocities and the like. “. . .This book is a must read for anyone who cares for the liberation and empowerment of dalits.” - Bama, a Renowned Dalit Novelist “This is a powerful, and at times heart wrenching book. Essential reading for all connected with the emancipation of Dalits. - Robert Maddox-Harle, Writer & Reviewer, Australia “The Famished God' is a successful academic endeavour in analyzing the roots of social, cultural, economic and political dialectics in India through its deliberations on hunger in Akkarmashi. . .” - Ajay Navaria, an Eminent Academician & Scholar

Randa Kassis starts from an anthropological challenge, saying that the system of religious ethics which is intended to form templates of what is forbidden or acceptable in sexual relationships between humans was only a modification of myths and dominating social experiences that sought to control this instinct to serve the power of forbidding. These myths have raised that form of ethics to a sacred rank, not only because they were unable to understand sex but because they were unable to understand the mysteries of nature too. Kassis takes up this challenge in order to say that life and liberty are parts of each other and they are linked to our capacity of awareness. If we discover that religious morality was a result of historical misunderstanding, then we will need to free this morality from the prison of human virtue.

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

Naked holy men denying sexuality and feeling; elderly people basking in the warmth and security provided by devoted and attentive family members; fastidious priests concerned solely with rules of purity and the minutiae of ritual practice; puritanical moralists concealing women and sexuality behind purdah's veils—these are familiar Western stereotypes of India. The essays in Divine Passions, however, paint other, more colorful and emotionally alive pictures of India: ecstatic religious devotees rolling in temple dust; gray-haired elders worrying about neglect and mistreatment by family members; priests pursuing a lusty, carefree ideal of the good life; and jokers reviling one another with bawdy, sexual insults at marriages. Drawing on rich ethnographic data from emotion-charged scenarios, these essays question Western academic theories of emotion, particularly those that reduce emotions to physiological sensations or to an individual's private feelings. Presenting an alternative view of emotions as culturally constructed and morally evaluative concepts grounded in the bodily self, the contributors to Divine Passions help dispel some of the West's persistent misconceptions of Indian emotional experience. Moreover, the edition as a whole argues for a new and different understanding of India based on field research and an understanding of the devotional (bhakti) tradition. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

"This book is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected-and received-answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food's capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti's implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarītradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference-not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society"--

An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds. Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated even within a century; its central tenets karma, dharma, to name just two arise at particular moments in Indian history and differ in each era, between genders, and caste to caste; and what is shared among Hindus is overwhelmingly outnumbered by the things that are unique to one group or another. Yet the greatness of Hinduism - its vitality, its earthiness, its vividness - lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate today. Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world. With her inimitable insight and expertise Doniger illuminates those moments within the tradition that resist forces that would standardize or establish a canon. Without reversing or misrepresenting the historical hierarchies, she reveals how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of and compassion toward women and lower castes; how they debate tensions surrounding religion, violence, and tolerance; and how animals are the key to important shifts in attitudes toward different social classes. The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers - many of them far removed from Brahmin authors of Sanskrit texts - have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms from which to consider the ironies, and overlooked epiphanies, of history.