"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--

In this theoretically rich work, Mason Kamana Allred unearths the ways Mormons have employed a wide range of technologies to translate events, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes into reproducible experiences that contribute to the growth of their religious systems of meaning. Drawing on methods from cultural history, media studies, and religious studies, Allred focuses specifically on technologies of vision that have shaped Mormonism as a culture of seeing. These technologies, he argues, were as essential to the making of Mormonism as the humans who received, interpreted, and practiced their faith. While Mormons' uses of television and the internet are recent examples of the tradition's use of visual technology, Allred excavates older practices and technologies for negotiating the spirit, such as panorama displays and magic lantern shows. Fusing media theory with feminist new materialism, he employs media archaeology to examine Mormons' ways of performing distinctions, beholding as a way to engender radical visions, and standardizing vision to effect assimilation. Allred's analysis reveals Mormonism as always materially mediated and argues that religious history is likewise inherently entangled with media.

Seeing Things is collection of lyrical narratives that focus on joy, grief, courage, fear, love. The twenty-three visions in this collection wrestle with the universal verities of our lives. Each chapter of the volume is a stand-alone vision, yet the chapters work together to create a single voice, building and spotlighting the strength we all must find as we move through our lives. The book focuses on the drawing-in of family, friends, and nature in those moments that shape us in the crucible.

Reproduction of the original: Seeing Things at Night by Heywood Broun

Ever wonder what makes a psychic tick? Or what goes on in the mind of someone who can foretell the future? Wonder no more! Read on! This biography of five working psychics will open your eyes, if not your mind, to their esoteric, inexplicable world.

If a spinning disk casts a round shadow does this shadow also spin? When you experience the total blackness of a cave, are you seeing in the dark? Or are you merely failing to see anything (just like your blind companion)? Seeing Dark Things uses visual riddles to explore our ability to see things that do not reflect light. Shadows and holes are anomalies for the causal theory of perception, which states that anything we see must be a cause of what we see. This requirement neatly explains why you see the front of a book's jacket and not its rear when you look at it face-on. However, the causal theory has trouble explaining how you manage to see the black letters on its surface. The letters are made visible by the light they fail to reflect rather than by the light they reflect. Nevertheless, Roy Sorensen defends the causal theory of perception by treating absences as causes. His fourteen chapters draw heavily on common sense and psychology to vindicate the assumption that we perceive absences. Seeing Dark Things is philosophy for the eye. It contains fifty-nine figures designed to prompt visual judgment. Sorensen proceeds bottom-up from observation rather than top-down from theory. He regards detailed analysis of absences as premature; he hopes a future theory will refine the pictorial thinking stimulated by the book's riddles. Just as the biologist pursues genetics with fruit flies, the metaphysician can study absences by means of shadows. Shadows are metaphysical amphibians with one foot on the terra firma of common sense and the other in the murky waters of nonbeing. Sorensen portrays the causal theory of perception's confrontation with the shadows as a triumph against alien attack - a victory that deepens a theory that resonates profoundly with common sense and science. In sum, Seeing Dark Things is an unorthodox defense of an orthodox theory. "Seeing Dark Things is an adventurous philosophical exercise in the ontology and epistemology of the commonsense world. Its treatment of the many puzzles that surround such putative 'negative' entities as shadows and holes will make it a classic on the literature on privations for many yeas to come. The book is also a wonderful example of how philosophy can be done without falling into the traps of the academic rigmarole. Sorensen is truly unique in his capacity to bring together classic philosophers, contemporary authors, and ticklish anecdotes." - Achille Varzi, Columbia University "This is a wonderful book, full of a profound, unsettling cleverness and weirdly satisfying counter-intuitiveness that the subject requires...a great book." - Richard Marshall, Bookforum "Sorensen is an extraordinarily fertile and imaginative philosopher, drawing widely on philosophy, physics, biology and vision science to mine his chosen quarry. His arguments, anecdotes and examples are always engaging. Add them to his effortless style and you have a rare commodity - a book of serious philosophy that many non-professionals will enjoy." - Ian Phillips, Times Literary Supplement "Sorensen's book is certainly fascinating and richly thought-provoking... he argues carefully and clearly in favour of his key claims, all of which merit very serious consideration, even if they sometimes provoke one to construct and defend alternative views. That, however, is surely the hallmark of the very best kind of philosophy writing. Seeing Dark Things is a model of this kind." - E.J. Lowe, Philosophy

This series is designed to promote reflection on the history, theology, and practice of Christian worship and to stimulate worship renewal in Christian congregations. Written by pastoral worship leaders from diverse communities and scholars from a range of disciplines, these volumes seek to nurture worship practices that are at once spiritually vital and theologically rooted. Book jacket.

Eastern Waves, Western Shores is a novel based on the life of a Sri Lankan woman who comes to study in England and then moves back to Sri Lanka and struggles fitting back in. The expectation of the elders, of society in general, cultural norms and the demands on a modern day career woman overwhelm her. She is torn between her loyalty to her family and the dreams she has for herself. It is a book about a looming arranged marriage, the yearning of young woman to fall in love hopefully with someone that is acceptable to her and her family, to live away from the family feuds and land disputes, away from the "dictatorship" of elders vs her duties towards them. Even after following her heart and her dreams she feels tormented sometimes and seeks an equilibrium in America.

"What Oliver Sacks does for the mind, Gonzalez-Crussi (On Being Born and Other Difficulties) does for the eye in this captivating set of philosophical meditations on the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. The author, amused and amazed by our desire to see what is forbidden, draws on historical and cultural examples, from Actaeon spying on the goddess Diana to a pair of voyeurs in revolutionary France who unwittingly incite a massacre. Mixed in with such accounts are personal reflections drawn from medicine. He is astounded, for example, at how many people have pestered him for access to an autopsy, just to say they'd seen one. The ornate sentences are filled with stunning images, like his description of an infant just emerged from the womb, bloody, "weakly flailing his arms" and crying, appearing to the author not as a symbol of life but as resembling "a foot-soldier in a defeated army, a pitiful survivor in a catastrophic retreat," and his prose never loses its elegance, even when the stories he tells veer into the bawdy. Not every anecdote resonates perfectly, but here is a charming raconteur who will who will win over readers with his thoughts on our visual connection to the world around us." c2.