In lively prose Michelle DeRusha tells their stories, bringing into focus fifty incredible heroines of the faith. From Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Anne Hutchison to Susanna Wesley, Harriet Tubman, and Corrie ten Boom, women both famous and admirable live again under DeRusha's expert pen. These engaging narratives are a potent reminder to readers that we are not alone, the battles we face today are not new, and God is always with us in the midst of the struggle.

    From the esoteric account of the evolution of the species to the occult roots of science, from the secrets of the Flood to the esoteric motives behind American foreign policy, here is a narrative history that shows the basic facts of human existence on this planet can be viewed from a very different angle. Everything in this history is upside down, inside out and the other way around.At the heart of "The Secret History of the World" is the belief that we can reach an altered state of consciousness in which we can see things about the way the world works that are hidden from us in our everyday, commonsensical consciousness. This history shows that by using secret techniques, people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and George Washington have worked themselves into this altered state - and been able to access supernatural levels of intelligence. There have been many books on the subject, but, extraordinarily, no-one has really listened to what the secret societies themselves say. The author has been helped in his researches by his friendship with a man who is an initiate of more than one secret society, and in one case an initiate of the highest level.

    In the ruined abbeys and elaborately decorated caves of England, the notorious Hellfire Club held meetings that shocked and terrified the countryside. London madams scoured the city for young girls to supply the club. Rakes flocked to meetings. Yet it was typical of late eighteenth century England that the club's members included famous men from the worlds of art and politics, even the then-Prime Minister. The list of members could almost be mistaken for the honours list of the most eminent men of the day and when news of the clubs activities leaked out, it caused the biggest political scandal in British history. Brilliant, perverse, equally capable of elaborately obscene jests and the intricacies of parliamentary politics, the members of the Hellfire Club were the most astonishing men of their time. Since its inception over two hundred years ago, the record of their revels has fascinated and repulsed the world.

    Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.

    A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, Living with a Wild God brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life." Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement.

    But what are his inner, personal thoughts on his own spiritual life? For the first time and in his own words, the Dalai Lama charts his spiritual journey from his boyhood days in rural Tibet to his years as a monk in the capital city of Dharamsala, to his life in exile as a world leader and symbol of peace.My Spiritual Journey provides a vivid and moving portrait of the Dalai Lama’s life journey that is personal in tone but universal in scope. He explores three phases or commitments of his spiritual life — as a human being, as a Buddhist monk, and as the Dalai Lama — each of which has made him more dedicated to exploring and teaching human values and inner happiness, promoting harmony among all religions, and advocating for the civil rights and well-being of the Tibetan people.At the age of two, little Tenzin Gyatso was identified as the fourteenth incarnation of the first Dalai Lama. From then on, his life has been a trajectory few can imagine. Some see him as a living Buddha and moral authority, others identify him as a “god-king,” which still others see him in political terms as either a hero or a counterrevolutionary. In My Spiritual Journey, we see the personal struggles, the courage, the laughter, and the compassion that have defined the remarkable life of one of our world’s greatest living legends.

    A spirited, compelling read."-Azadeh Moaveni, author of Lipstick JihadIf the Oceans Were Ink is Carla Power's eye-opening story of how she and her longtime friend Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi found a way to confront ugly stereotypes and persistent misperceptions that were cleaving their communities. Their friendship-between a secular American and a madrasa-trained sheikh-had always seemed unlikely, but now they were frustrated and bewildered by the battles being fought in their names. Both knew that a close look at the Quran would reveal a faith that preached peace and not mass murder; respect for women and not oppression. And so they embarked on a yearlong journey through the controversial text.A journalist who grew up in the Midwest and the Middle East, Power offers her unique vantage point on the Quran's most provocative verses as she debates with Akram at cafes, family gatherings, and packed lecture halls, conversations filled with both good humor and powerful insights. Their story takes them to madrasas in India and pilgrimage sites in Mecca, as they encounter politicians and jihadis, feminist activists and conservative scholars. Armed with a new understanding of each other's worldviews, Power and Akram offer eye-opening perspectives, destroy long-held myths, and reveal startling connections between worlds that have seemed hopelessly divided for far too long.

    As well as illuminating her early childhood and wartime experiences, the book offers a fresh perspective on the role she played in the infamous Babalon Working magick rituals, that were conducted by her husband, the maverick rocket scientist and Aleister Crowley disciple, Jack Parsons, and the future founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard. Following Parsons death in 1952 from a chemical explosion, Cameron inherited her husband's magickal mantle and embarked on a lifelong spiritual quest, a journey reflected in the otherworldly images she depicted, many of them drawn from the Elemental Kingdom and astral plane. The biography also takes an in-depth look at Cameron's artistry and film appearances, and features reminiscences from the many artists, poets and movie star friends she inspired along the way. With so much of her life and work shrouded in mystery, Wormwood Star sheds new light on this most remarkable artist and elusive occult icon.

    Willie Parker grew up in the Deep South, lived in a Christian household, and converted to an even more fundamentalist form of Christianity as a young man. But upon reading an interpretation of the Good Samaritan in a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he realized that in order to be a true Christian, he must show compassion for all women regardless of their needs. In 2009, he stopped practicing obstetrics to focus entirely on providing safe abortions for the women who need help the most—often women in poverty and women of color—and in the hot bed of the pro-choice debate: the South. He soon thereafter traded in his private practice and his penthouse apartment in Hawaii for the life of an itinerant abortion provider, focusing most recently on women in the Deep South. In Life’s Work, Dr. Willie Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative that illuminates the complex societal, political, religious, and personal realities of abortion in the United States from the unique perspective of someone who performs them and defends the right to do so every day. He also looks at how a new wave of anti-abortion activism, aimed at making incremental changes in laws and regulations state by state, are slowly chipping away at the rights of women to control their own lives. In revealing his daily battle against mandatory waiting periods and bogus rules governing the width of hallways, Dr. Parker uncovers the growing number of strings attached to the right to choose and makes a powerful Christian case for championing reproductive rights.

    For two decades, historian Alice Dreger has led a life of extraordinary engagement, combining activist service to victims of unethical medical research with defense of scientists whose work has outraged identity politics activists. With spirit and wit, Dreger offers in Galileo’s Middle Finger an unforgettable vision of the importance of rigorous truth seeking in today’s America, where both the free press and free scholarly inquiry struggle under dire economic and political threats.This illuminating chronicle begins with Dreger’s own research into the treatment of people born intersex (once called hermaphrodites). Realization of the shocking surgical and ethical abuses conducted in the name of “normalizing” intersex children’s gender identities moved Dreger to become an internationally recognized patient rights’ activist. But even as the intersex rights movement succeeded, Dreger began to realize how some fellow progressive activists were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed uncomfortable truths about humans. In researching one such case, Dreger suddenly became the target of just these kinds of attacks.Troubled, she decided to try to understand more—to travel the country to ferret out the truth behind various controversies, to obtain a global view of the nature and costs of these battles. Galileo’s Middle Finger describes Dreger’s long and harrowing journeys between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice activists determined to win and researchers determined to put hard truths before comfort. Ultimately what emerges is a lesson about the intertwining of justice and of truth—and a lesson of the importance of responsible scholars and journalists to our fragile democracy.

    

    P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms. Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York's literary select. He wrote for publications such as "The New York Times Magazine," "Esquire," and "Harper's Bazaar." His first book, "Breaking Open the Head," was heralded as the most significant on psychedelic experimentation since the work of Terence McKenna. But slowly something happened: Rather than writing from a journalistic remove, Pinchbeck-his literary powers at their peak-began to participate in the shamanic and metaphysical belief systems he was encountering. As his psyche and body opened to new experience, disparate threads and occurrences made sense like never before: Humanity, every sign pointed, is precariously balanced between greater self-potential and environmental disaster. The Mayan calendar's "end date" of 2012 seems to define our present age: It heralds the end of one way of existence and the return of another, in which the serpent god Quetzalcoatl reigns anew, bringing with him an unimaginably ancient-yet, to us, wholly new-way of living. A result not just of study but also of participation, "2012" tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own hopes and anxieties about modern life.

    Twenty years on, Hancock returns with the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new, scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light...Near the end of the last Ice Age 12,800 years ago, a giant comet that had entered the solar system from deep space thousands of years earlier, broke into multiple fragments. Some of these struck the Earth causing a global cataclysm on a scale unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least eight of the fragments hit the North American ice cap, while further fragments hit the northern European ice cap. The impacts, from comet fragments a mile wide approaching at more than 60,000 miles an hour, generated huge amounts of heat which instantly liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice, destabilizing the Earth's crust and causing the global Deluge that is remembered in myths all around the world. A second series of impacts, equally devastating, causing further cataclysmic flooding, occurred 11,600 years ago, the exact date that Plato gives for the destruction and submergence of Atlantis.The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. But there were survivors - known to later cultures by names such as 'the Sages', 'the Magicians', 'the Shining Ones', and 'the Mystery Teachers of Heaven'. They travelled the world in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization burning. They settled at key locations - Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they went these 'Magicians of the Gods' brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price. A memory and a warning to the future...For the comet that wrought such destruction between 12,800 and 11,600 years may not be done with us yet. Astronomers believe that a 20-mile wide 'dark' fragment of the original giant comet remains hidden within its debris stream and threatens the Earth. An astronomical message encoded at Gobekli Tepe, and in the Sphinx and the pyramids of Egypt,warns that the 'Great Return' will occur in our time...

    Containing simple narrative, ecstatic poetry, complex argument, and discourse, Adi Da’s autobiography reveals the miraculous story of his unique incarnation and revelation in the west for “the sake of liberating all beings.” The revised edition includes an expanded description of Adi Da’s early life leading up to his divine reawakening in 1970, as well as revelations about the spiritual work of the great realizers in his lineage. "From time to time, there is a book that challenges, and eventually changes, the entire perspective of a civilization. In modern times, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was such a book–and, centuries before Darwin, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres of Copernicus (the first publication of the theory that the earth orbits the sun). The Knee Of Listening is such an epoch-making book–in an entirely different way. Appearing at the beginning of the third millennium of the Common Era, it carries a Revelation that has the potential to transform all future time. This book is not about how life on earth physically evolved, nor the design of the solar system (of which this planet is a part). The Knee Of Listening is about Reality Itself, the Reality within which this earth and its cosmic locale arise—the Blissful, Effulgent, Conscious Force of Being which is always so, and which can be located and enjoyed under every possible condition, and in every dimension of space-time."—from the Introduction by Carolyn Lee, PhD

    This title examines the creeds of religions, alongside the myths and symbols of various cultures.