. . . I did have stories. I hadn’t dared to tell many people about them, but I definitely had had what I believed to be encounters with the Divine. I wondered if many other people had stories too. What happened next surprised me most. I realized that a Divine intelligence that many people call God is connecting with millions of people every day. These are their stories.” —from the IntroductionIn God Stories, Jennifer Skiff shares the extraordinary experiences of people who have felt the power of God’s presence in their lives and been forever changed. A doctor opens the chest of a dying heart patient to discover her heart is healed; Marines watch as a fellow soldier in Iraq is hit by a powerful explosion only to discover, when the dust settles, that he is still standing and has no injuries; a struggling couple receive an answer to a prayer and are prevented from making a mistake that could cost them their children; a young woman loses her boyfriend on 9/11 and receives a message that brings her peace.Reassuring, hopeful, and unforgettable, these amazing confirmations of divine intervention will lift your spirit and leave you wondering—and even remembering—when your life was touched by a miracle.

    Since his death in 1987, countless readers have been challenged to encounter DeMellos message.

    With the authority of a scholar and the sparkle of an old-time storyteller, Dr. Volney Steele takes the reader from rotgut whiskey to modern anesthetics, from castor oil to antibiotics, and from barroom surgery to modern hospital operations. Dr. Steele wrote Bleed, Blister, and Purge "to shed light on and celebrate the dedication and humanitarianism of those many physicians, nurses, shamans, and people of sound practical sense who saw their patients--often friends and family--through the adversities that bedeviled them."

    As such, he is the quintessential subject for the innovative historiography Jan Assmann both defines and practices in this work, the study of historical memory--a study, in this case, of the ways in which factual and fictional events and characters are stored in religious beliefs and transformed in their philosophical justification, literary reinterpretation, philological restitution (or falsification), and psychoanalytic demystification.To account for the complexities of the foundational event through which monotheism was established, Moses the Egyptian goes back to the short-lived monotheistic revolution of the Egyptian king Akhenaten (1360-1340 B.C.E.). Assmann traces the monotheism of Moses to this source, then shows how his followers denied the Egyptians any part in the origin of their beliefs and condemned them as polytheistic idolaters. Thus began the cycle in which every counter-religion, by establishing itself as truth, denounced all others as false. Assmann reconstructs this cycle as a pattern of historical abuse, and tracks its permutations from ancient sources, including the Bible, through Renaissance debates over the basis of religion to Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism. One of the great Egyptologists of our time, and an exceptional scholar of history and literature, Assmann is uniquely equipped for this undertaking--an exemplary case study of the vicissitudes of historical memory that is also a compelling lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.

    Beginning with King Arthur, Professor Madden peels back layers of exaggeration and fiction to lay bare the historical basis for the mythological king. Madden then examines myths of the medieval church, sexual myths of the Middle Ages, and myths about Robin Hood and the Shroud of Turin, all the time imparting an understanding of just what medieval people thought about their planet. Contents: King Arthur: man vs. myth -- Medieval and modern mysteries of the Holy Grail -- A female Pope? The myth and legends of Pope Joan -- Burn them all: witches and inquisitors in the Middle Ages -- Medieval sexual myths: chastity belts and the Lord's "right of first night" -- Splitting arrows: the history and myth of Robin Hood -- Sailing off the edge of the world: the myth of the flat Earth -- Is the Shroud of Turin a Medieval forgery?

    Mack's investigation of the various groups and strands of the early Christian community, out of which were generated the texts of Christianity's first anthology of religious literature, makes sense of a topic that has been confusing.

    The calls to ban it were more or less instant.Re:cyclists is the tale of what happened next, of how we have spent two centuries wheeling our way about town and country on bikes--or on two-wheeled things that vaguely resembled what we now call bikes. Michael Hutchinson picks his way through those 200 years, discovering how cycling became a kinky vaudeville act for Parisians, how it became an American business empire, and how it went on to find a unique home in the British Isles. He considers the penny-farthing riders exploring the abandoned and lonely coaching roads during the railway era, and the Victorian high-society cyclists of the 1890s bicycle craze--a time when no aristocratic house party was without bicycles and when the Prince of Wales used to give himself an illicit thrill on a weekday afternoon by watching the women's riding-school in the Royal Albert Hall.Re:cyclists looks at how cycling became the sport, the pastime and the social life of millions of ordinary people, how it grew and how it suffered through the 1960s and '70s, and how at the dawn of the twenty-first century it rose again, much changed but still ultimately just someone careering along on two wheels.

    In the vivid and lucid style that we expect from the author of the popular Akhenaten, Redford presents a sweeping narrative of the love-hate relationship between the peoples of ancient Israel/Palestine and Egypt.

    But even spending an entire day with Ozzy Osbourne wasn't as frightening as when he agreed to follow Philadelphia "demonologist" Lou Gentile on his appointed rounds. Will Storr never believed in ghosts—but his healthy skepticism couldn't explain the strange lights and sounds he witnessed, and the weird behavior of the occupants of several allegedly haunted houses.What resulted is a confirmed cynic's (and proud of it!) dedicated search for answers in a shadowy world of séances, mediums, devil worshippers—even the Vatican's chief exorcist. So get ready to confront the genuinely creepy along with the hilariously ridiculous in Will Storr vs. the Supernatural!

    It also shows how enlightenment is earned by personal dedication to a spiritual code of conduct.

    Religion, medicine, technology, and what we would call magic coexisted without apparent conflict, and it was not unusual for magical and practical remedies for illness, for example, to be used side by side. Everyone resorted to magic, from the pharaoh guarding his country with elaborate magical rituals to the expectant mother wearing amulets to safeguard her unborn child. In this book, Geraldine Pinch examines the connections between myth and magic and the deities--such as the goddess Isis, and the protective lion-demon Bes--who had special magical importance. She discusses the techniques of magic, its practitioners, and the surviving magical texts, as well as the objects that were used in magic: figurines, statues, amulets, and wands. She devotes a chapter to medicine and magic and one to magic and the dead. Finally, Dr. Pinch shows how elements and influences from Egyptian magic survived in or were taken up by later societies, right down to our own century.

    Bernard Haisch contends that there is a purpose and an underlying intelligence behind the Universe, one that is consistent with modern science, especially the Big Bang and evolution. It is based on recent discoveries that there are numerous coincidences and fine-tunings of the laws of nature that seem extraordinarily unlikely.A more rational concept of God is called for. As astrophysicist Sir James Jeans wrote, "the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."Despite bestsellers by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris that have denounced the evils of religion and proclaimed that science has shown that there is no God, The Purpose-Guided Universe shows how one can believe in God and science.

    Friedman is a fascinating, intellectual, yet highly readable analysis and investigation into the authorship of the Old Testament. The author of Commentary on the Torah, Friedman delves deeply into the history of the Bible in a scholarly work that is as exciting and surprising as a good detective novel. Who Wrote the Bible? is enlightening, riveting, an important contribution to religious literature, and as the Los Angeles Times aptly observed in its rave review, “There is no other book like this one.”

    These provocative, cutting-edge scholars now represent a direct challenge to the academic establishment as the paradigms of science and history shift and their ideas gain acceptance. Representing the latest, often controversial findings in scientific and historical research, this anthology of essays commissioned by Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, covers the forefront in alternative theories on history, the origins of civilization, technology, and consciousness with topics ranging from quantum philosophy and paranormal phenomena to the ancient use of electromagnetism, the effect of cosmic rays on human evolution, and NASA’s cover-up of ancient Martian civilizations. Recognizing that many recent discoveries are actually rediscoveries of lost knowledge from past civilizations, these authors seek to understand where, within the bigger picture of human knowledge, our present time fits into the cycle of human existence.