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  Teaching Ritual

  Catherine Bell

  Many teachers share an interest in bringing a better appreciation of ritual into their religious studies classes, but are uncertain how to do it. Religious studies faculty know how to teach texts, but they often have difficulty teaching something for which the meaning lies in the doing. How do you teach such “doing”? How much need be done? How does the teacher talk about the religiosity that exists in personalized relationships, not textual descriptions or prescriptions? These practical issues also give rise to theoretical questions. Giving more attention to ritual effectively suggests a reinterpretation of religion itself — an understanding less focused on what people have thought and written, and more focused on how they engage their universe. Many useful analyses of ritual derive from anthropological and sociological premises, which may be foreign to religious studies faculties and even seen by some as theologically problematic. This book addresses the issues specific to teaching this subject. The chapter contributors explain what has worked for them in the classroom, what has not, and what they have learned from the experience of being more real about religion.

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  Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System

  Michelle Burnham

  Folded Selves radically refigures traditional portraits of seventeenth-century New England literature and culture by situating colonial writing within the spatial, transnational, and economic contexts that characterized the early-modern world system theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein and others. Michelle Burnham rethinks American literary history and the politics of colonial dissent, and her book breaks new ground in making the economic relations of investment, credit, and trade central to this new framework for early American literary and cultural study.

  Transcontinental colonialism and mercantile capitalism underwrote not just the emerging world system but New World writing suggesting that early modern literary aesthetics and the early modern economy helped to sponsor each other. Burnham locates in New England s literature of dissent from Ma-re Mount to the Salem witchcraft trials a persistent use of economic language, as well as competing economies of style. The brilliance of Burnham's study is that it exposes the transoceanic material and commercial concerns of colonial America s literature and culture of dissent."

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  Civilizations Past & Present, Combined Volume (12th Edition)

  Robert R. Edgar, Neil J. Hackett, Geroge F. Jewsbury, Barbara Molony, and Matthew S. Gordon

  Civilizations Past and Present , written by specialists in Islamic, African, Asian, Ancient, and East European history— offers a clear and accessible analysis of diverse trends shaping world history.

  Civilizations Past and Present, now in its Twelfth Edition, is a survey text well known in the marketplace for its readability, offering a strong narrative exploration of world history that examines details at levels appropriate for both students and instructors. The book’s narrative–enriched by photographs, maps, primary source documents, timelines, and other pedagogical aids–places great emphasis on the connections between the world’s many cultures and regions. The book uses intriguing avenues of historical interpretation and examines all of the major areas of historical study: social, political, economic, religious, cultural, and geographic.

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  The Postcolonial and the Global

  Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley

  This interdisciplinary work brings the humanities and social sciences into dialogue by examining issues such as globalized capital, discourses of antiterrorism, and identity politics. Essayists from the fields of postcolonial studies and globalization theory address the ethical and pragmatic ramifications of opposing interpretations of these issues and, for the first time, seek common ground.

  Contributors: Pal Ahluwalia, U of California, San Diego; Arjun Appadurai, New School U; Geoffrey Bowker, Santa Clara U; Timothy Brennan, U of Minnesota; Ruth Buchanan, U of British Columbia; Verity Burgmann, U of Melbourne; Pheng Cheah, U of California, Berkeley; Inderpal Grewal, U of California, Irvine; Ramon Grosfoguel, U of California, Berkeley; Barbara Harlow, U of Texas, Austin; Anouar Majid, U of New England; John McMurtry, U of Guelph; Walter D. Mignolo, Duke U; Sundhya Pahuja, U of Melbourne; R. Radhakrishnan, U of California, Irvine; Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State U; E. San Juan, Philippine Forum, New York; Saskia Sassen, U of Chicago; Ella Shohat, New York U; Leslie Sklair, London School of Economics; Robert Stam, New York U; Madina Tlostanova, Russian Peoples’ Friendship U; Harish Trivedi, U of Delhi.

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  Spirit, Science and Health: How the Spiritual Mind Fuels Physical Wellness

  Thomas G. Plante PhD, ABPP and Carl E. Thoresen

  From meditation to reciting mantras or praying, spirituality is more and more often being recognized for its beneficial effects on health. In this volume, a team of experts from across disciplines including psychology, medicine, nursing, public health, and pastoral care offer reader-friendly chapters showing the state of the art in understanding this connection. Chapters include attention to special populations such as youth, HIV/AIDS patients, cancer patients, and those in hospice care. Contributors, all members of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University, aim to use the scientific understanding of the spirituality/health connection to promote better health for the general public.

  From meditation to reciting mantras or praying, spirituality is more and more often being recognized for its beneficial effects on health. In this volume, a team of experts from across disciplines including psychology, medicine, nursing, public health, and pastoral care offer reader-friendly chapters showing the state of the art in understanding this connection. Chapters include attention to special populations such as youth, HIV/AIDS patients, cancer patients, and those in hospice care. Contributors, all members of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University, aim to use the scientific understanding of the spirituality/health connection to promote better health for the general public. One focus of this volume is to show easy ways to incorporate spiritual practices in an environment that is often multicultural, multi-religious, stressful, hurried, and secular.