The Mystique of the Skies--As Heaven or Hell The book's subtitle provides an inkling of the wondrous and sometimes brutal activities of mankind in the sky. Since the first powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, the air above the Earth has enveloped countless instances of lifesaving aerial exertions and, on the other hand, vicious warmongering. The skies can be used for the benefit of, and also, the unwarranted deprivation and destruction of people. From personal experiences, and documented events in the history of aviation, the author's memoirs describe events illustrating the unpredictable nature of mankind. Interwoven are recitations of airborne bliss, tension, and unexplained aerial phenomena. Centuries-old cultural or racial customs often affect aviation endeavors and evoked personal conflicts which had to be resolved within the author's own perception of Spirituality. Occasionally, aviation-related dilemmas can catch a crewmember totally unprepared. Such occurrences can cause apprehension, a feeling of helplessness, or even terror. It is a heartwarming experience when such quandaries are resolved by the intervention of unseen forces, undefined by science or not fully articulated by religion. The writer regards flying as a combined physical, mental, and spiritual immersion in the medium of air, whether piloting a gigantic airliner or a fragile hang glider. A pilot, by virtue of being "up front" and particularly when transporting passengers, assumes the role of a committed, principled leader. This exemplifies the type of selfless leadership that is sorely needed in our world of human frailty.

Exploring religious and spiritual intentional communities active in the world today, Spiritual and Visionary Communities provides a balanced introduction to a diverse range of communities worldwide. Breaking new ground with its focus on communities which have had little previous academic or public attention, the authors explore a part of contemporary society which is rarely understood. Communities studied include: Israeli kibbutzim, Mandarom, the Twelve Tribes, ’The Farm’ and the Camphill movement. Written from a range of perspectives, this collection includes contributions from members of the groups themselves, former members, and academic observers, and as such will offer a unique and invaluable discussion of religious and spiritual communities in the U.S., Europe, and beyond.

The imagined ghosts of Native Americans have been an important element of colonial fantasy in North America ever since European settlements were established in the seventeenth century. Native burial grounds and Native ghosts have long played a role in both regional and local folklore and in the national literature of the United States and Canada, as settlers struggled to create a new identity for themselves that melded their European heritage with their new, North American frontier surroundings. In this interdisciplinary volume, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush bring together scholars from a variety of fields to discuss this North American fascination with ?the phantom Native American.?ø ø Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence explores the importance of ancestral spirits and historic places in Indigenous and settler communities as they relate to territory and history?in particular cultural, political, social, historical, and environmental contexts. From examinations of how individuals reacted to historical cases of ?hauntings,? to how Native phantoms have functioned in the literature of North Americans, to interdisciplinary studies of how such beliefs and narratives allowed European settlers and Indigenous people to make sense of the legacies of colonialism and conquest, these essays show how the past and the present are intertwined through these stories.

Inner Messiah, Divine Character encourages readers to deploy their imaginations in describing their lives as a confluence of narrative constructs to identify, analyze, and overcome obstacles and destructive patterns in both their personal and professional lives. The book promotes a three-point strategy to empower and to improve readers' attitudes about their personal and professional struggles. Drawing on the scholarship of Ancient Jewish mysticism and its influence on Freudian and Jungian analysis, Inner Messiah, Divine Character helps readers discover the "Be" within their "Being" to create new opportunities in the present, motivates readers to perceive "Beyond" their limitations and ordinary expectations, and encourages readers to strive for the superlative in their endeavors to achieve their "Best."

The Eucharist continues to be central to contemporary Christian religious tradition and to be the focus for a wide range of assumptions and disputes. Chief amongst these disputes is the role of women in the theology and the ritual of the Eucharist.Reinterpreting the Eucharist brings together a diverse range of voices with each using their own marginalized experience to explore other ways – indigenous culture, medieval and contemporary art, social history, and environmental ethics – of engaging with the Eucharist. Presenting new forms of theological and ethical engagement, the book responds to the challenge of reconsidering the meaning of the Eucharist today.

This book is the first comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. It argues that the four Meditations—which Nietzsche said “deserve the greatest attention for my development”—are not separate pieces, but instead form a unified philosophic narrative that constitutes his first attempt to diagnose and cure the spiritual ailments whose causes he traced to modern culture and science. Taking Nietzsche’s commentary on the four essays in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo as its interpretive guide, this book also shows that the Untimely Meditations contain early expositions of concepts like the last man, the overman, the new philosopher, the creation of values, and the malleability of nature—all staples of his later philosophy.

This book focuses on the issues of space, culture and identity in recent Australian fiction. It discusses the work of 15 authors to show that, in Australia, the meaning of “country” remains critical and cultural belonging is still a difficult process. Interrogating the definition of Australia as a “post-colonial nation” and its underlying extension from Britain, it applies Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of the Radicant to examine Australian writing beyond the “post” of “post-colonialism”. The book shows that some authors are engaged in writing about the country and the time in which they live, but that they also share common critical views on the definition of multiculturalism, the belonging to place, and integration in the nation. The volume suggests that theories of cultural hybridism presented as a decolonising methodology in fact dissolve singularity in the same way that globalisation creates standardisation. It argues that 21st century Australian fiction depicts the subject as a radicant and that Australian culture constitutes a mobile entity unconnected to any soil.

This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian‐born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879–1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen’s neo‐Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitätsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler’s philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Émile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group’s sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology.

Over the past generation, the rise of East Asia and especially China has brought about a sea change in the economic and political world order. At the same time, global warming, environmental degradation, food and water shortages, population explosion, and income inequities have created a perfect storm that threatens the very survival of humanity. It is clear now that the Westphalian model of individual sovereign states seeking their own self-interest will not be able to respond effectively to this win-win or lose-lose crisis. In this volume, a cadre of distinguished scholars comes together to reflect on Confucianism and Deweyan pragmatism as possible resources for a new geopolitics that begins from an ontology of interdependence and recognizes the irreducibly ecological nature of the human experience at every level. Both Confucian and Deweyan traditions emphasize the primacy of experience, the importance of vital relationality, and the moral roots of good governance. The potential benefits of conceptually blending the two are many. Indeed, the contemporary Chinese philosopher Tang Junyi provides us with a cosmological understanding of the “idea” of Confucianism that, in parallel to Dewey’s “idea” of democracy, can enable us to anticipate the core values, if not the specific contours, of a “Confucian democracy.” Just as Dewey’s “idea” of democracy is his vision of the flourishing communal life made possible by the contributions of the uniquely distinguished persons that constitute it, Tang Junyi’s Confucianism is a pragmatic naturalism directed at achieving the most highly integrated cultural, moral, and spiritual growth for the individual-in-community. In both, we find an affirmation of communal harmony as a process “starting here and going there” through which those involved learn together to do ordinary things in extraordinary ways. Just such a cosmological understanding of democracy is one way of describing what will be needed to address the many predicaments characterizing the environmental, cultural, socioeconomic, and political dynamics of the twenty-first century.