Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) were icons of their age, literary giants who dominated the British cultural landscape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet both were cosmopolitan outsiders who lived in London as expatriates but remained products of their biographical histories Carlyle as the working class Scotsman and Eliot the transplanted New England patrician. Carlyle quickly earned himself a reputation as the "Chelsea Sage" of the Victorian Era, the cultural prophet whose creative and critical works, informal salon gatherings, and oracular personality generated an unprecedented following among both the intellectuals and masses. His opinion and company were sought out by almost every major luminary of his century, including John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And his social and political insights, like his aesthetic and philosophical views, touched on wide-ranging subjects from Romatic poetry and German history to parliamentary reform and slavery abolition. Similarly, T. S. Eliot's reputation as a writer and social observer enjoyed mythic status as he became the preeminent twentieth-century critic of the English-speaking world. In his verse masterpiece The Waste Land, spiritual drama Murder in the Cathedral, Christian social initiatives with Moot, and editorial leadership at The Criterion, Eliot conversed with the principal figures and movements of his time, from Charles Maurras and the struggles against communism to G. K. Chesterton and disputes over Anglican reform. Ultimately, however, both men may be seen as moderns whose sensitivities inclined them to encounter the monumental historical changes of their day with a unique historical perspective and an informed cultural conservatism. Democratization, industrialization, urbanization, and population growth were signs of changing times, signs demanding a new vision and mode of expression to integrate and process rapidly transforming realities. And Carlyle and Eliot address these by establishing a spiritual response to modernity's loss of faith in transcendent authority. Their conceptions of self, society, and God are communicated, in other words, through a literary form that engages the conditions of modernity through the language, categories, and symbols of the Western humanistic and Christian traditions. And because their cultural and theoretical judgments fall on that historical continuum between the pre-modern and postmodern, their lives and works are particularly relevant as case studies that can tell us much about the historical progression of European intellectual and cultural history into the twenty-first century.

Confucianism is reviving in China and spreading in America. The past and present interactions between the revived Confucianism and Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity will likely shape the cultural and political developments in Chinese societies of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., and will have global implications in the globalizing world. In addition to the philosophical and theological articulations of Confucianism and other spiritual traditions, this volume includes empirical studies of and analytical reflections on the spiritual traditions in Chinese societies by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. It is a collection of articles by the best minds in China and the West, and the top experts in multiple disciplines. Collectively, the volume provides an assessment of the present situation and points to the possibilities of future development of Confucianism and other spiritual traditions in modern China and beyond.

In this volume the author looks at the rise of a cultivated audience whose skill involved listening rather than playing or singing, in the early 17th century.

Archaeological heritage can be disputed, especially where it is important to religions and their practitioners. While the destruction of archaeological sites in war – often due to religious fervour – is frequently making the headlines, apparently lesser disputes about local heritage sites go unreported. This book focuses on these lesser, but much more frequent, potential conflicts between archaeological heritage management and conservation on the one hand, and practitioners of religious beliefs who use archaeological heritage in their practice on the other. By exploring case studies from Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Norway, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Wales, this book examines the interaction between spiritual practice and monuments conservation. This book will be of great interest to heritage professionals, archaeologists, historians, conservationists and religious practitioners alike, through its exploration of various kinds of interactions between these different heritage communities and their interests in archaeology.

While most people today take hygiene and medicine for granted, they both have had their own history. We can gain deep insights into the pre-modern world by studying its health-care system, its approaches to medicine, and concept of hygiene. Already the early Middle Ages witnessed great interest in bathing (hot and cold), swimming, and good personal hygiene. Medical activities grew over time, but even early medieval monks were already great experts in treating the sick. The contributions examine literary, medical, historical texts and images and probe the information we can glean from them. The interdisciplinary approach of this volume makes it possible to view this large field in a complex and diversified manner, taking into account both early medieval and early modern treatises on medicine, water, bathing, and health. Such a cultural-historical perspective creates a most valuable bridge connecting literary and scientific documents under the umbrella of the history of mentality and history of everyday life. The volume does not aim at idealizing the past, but it definitely intends to deconstruct modern myths about the 'dirty' and 'unhealthy' Middle Ages and early modern age.

In this book Revered Swami Vireswarananda Maharaj gives an authentic articulation of the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda and of their relevancy in solving the spiritual problems that face us in our individual and collective lives. It contains many illuminating insights into spiritual matters and also provide practical hints to live spiritual life in a modern setting.

Our brains are getting wired differently in the world of digital technology, information revolution, and in the inter-cultural world of global society. Think of the new vocabulary: Global brain, collective intelligence, global village, and cyberspace. That should tell us something about the neural rewiring that is taking place inside of our brains, whether or not we are aware of it. The fact that the human brain changes throughout a person's life in response to intellectual stimulation, physical exercise, exposure to new cultural environments, learning opportunities, and challenges is a revolutionary discovery. Till twenty years ago neuroscientists believed in the conventional theory that the brain's ability at making new neural connections stopped before a child entered adolescence. That is the old dogma. There is a "Second Copernican Revolution" taking place inside of our brains, writes the author, quoting Carl Zimmer. Some experts are suggesting that we are already living in what Richard Restack calls the "neurosociety." Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, is predicting that by 2045 A.D., human beings will be living in an era of "singularity," when non biological machines invented by human brains and human ingenuity are going to outsmart human intelligence billions of times. What is going to be the fate of the human spirit, human spirituality, the feeling of connection to a force and power that is greater than us (God), our ability to use spiritual imagination and our intelligence? Are we progressively moving away from religion and community-based spirituality into the "spirituality of different strokes for different folks?" In his groundbreaking book, Spiritual Intelligence and The Neuroplastic Brain: A Contextual Interpretation of Modern History, Charles W. Mark takes the reader on a journey through modern history and shows the glimpse of what is to come. http: //www.spirituality-intelligence.com

In 1911 Vasily Kandinsky published the first edition of ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, a landmark modernist treatise in which he sought to reframe the meaning of art and the true role of the artist. For many artists of late Imperial Russia – a culture deeply influenced by the regime’s adoption of Byzantine Orthodoxy centuries before – questions of religion and spirituality were of paramount importance. As artists and the wider art community experimented with new ideas and interpretations at the dawn of the twentieth century, their relationship with ‘the spiritual’ – broadly defined – was inextricably linked to their roles as pioneers of modernism. This diverse collection of essays introduces new and stimulating approaches to the ongoing debate as to how Russian artistic modernism engaged with questions of spirituality in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Ten chapters from emerging and established voices offer new perspectives on Kandinsky and other familiar names, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova, and introduce less well-known figures, such as the Georgian artists Ucha Japaridze and Lado Gudiashvili, and the craftswoman and art promoter Aleksandra Pogosskaia. Prefaced by a lively and informative introduction by Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow that sets these perspectives in their historical and critical context, Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives enriches our understanding of the modernist period and breaks new ground in its re-examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the visual arts in late Imperial Russia. Of interest to historians and enthusiasts of Russian art, culture, and religion, and those of international modernism and the avant-garde, it offers innovative readings of a history only partially explored, revealing uncharted corners and challenging long-held assumptions.

Modern American Spiritualism: Twenty Years' Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits by Emma Hardinge Britten, first published in 1870, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.