Download or read book Visionary Experiences Examined written by Daniel Klimek and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation will make a contribution to debates on mysticism and religious experiences by exploring the neuroscientific and medical studies performed on the Medjugorje visionaries and analyze what hermeneutical contributions these studies make to our understanding of extraordinary religious experiences. In June 1981, in the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina (the former Yugoslavia), five teenagers and one child reported experiencing daily apparitions of the Virgin Mary, visionary experiences. Three of the six visionaries report to continue experiencing daily apparitions as adults. Throughout the past three decades, the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to an extensive amount of medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while experiencing their apparitions. An exploration of the various scientific studies related to the visionaries of Medjugorje adds to our understanding of extraordinary religious experiences and responds to the need for incorporating new, multidisciplinary approaches to the study and interpretation of religious and mystical experiences. This dissertation examines the major hermeneutical and epistemological debates surrounding the topic of religious and mystical experiences, tracing the major philosophical developments of the twentieth century. Using a constructive-relational method, this study presents and analyzes the scientific examinations on the Medjugorje visionaries in juxtaposition, for the first time, with the major scholars and hermeneutical discourses focusing on religious experience. This dissertation demonstrates that the scientific studies on the Medjugorje seers make a threefold contribution: a contribution that is epistemological, hermeneutical, and that strengthens a criteria of adequacy in discerning religious experiences. The scientific studies in Medjugorje challenge an epistemological reductionism that denigrates every extraordinary religious phenomenon, such as visionary experiences, into a pathological or natural category of interpretation. Making a contribution to the history of hermeneutical debates about mystical experiences, the scientific studies on the Medjugorje visionaries point to something more in the experiences that the visionaries undergo through empirical examination of their apparitional phenomena.
Download or read book Trials of the Visionary Mind written by John Weir Perry and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive summary of the author's revolutionary approach to psychosis.
Download or read book Medjugorje and the Supernatural written by Daniel Maria Klimek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1981, six young Croatians in the village of Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia, reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them. The Medjugorje visionaries say that Mary has returned every day since then, bringing them important messages from heaven to convey to the world. Throughout history, people have reported encountering extraordinary religious experiences-apparitions of the Virgin Mary, visions of Jesus Christ, weeping statues and icons, the stigmata, physical healings and miracles, and experiences of the afterlife-and interpreted them as supernatural in origin. Scholars have often tried to reinterpret such experiences, including those described by the great mystics like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Avila, into natural or psychopathological categories, such as hysteria, hallucination, delusion, epileptic seizures, psychosis, the workings of the unconscious mind, or fraud. Are such reductionist explanations valid? Over the past three decades the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to extensive medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while undergoing their visionary experiences. Daniel Klimek argues that the case of Medjugorje affords a rare opportunity to understand a deeper dimension of extraordinary religious phenomena. Presenting and analyzing the scientific studies on the visionaries in juxtaposition with the major scholars and debates surrounding religious experience, Klimek concludes that a multidisciplinary approach grants a more holistic and deeper understanding of such extraordinary religious experiences.
Download or read book Gnostic Visions written by Luke A. Myers and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gnostic texts are filled with encounters of strange other worldly beings, journeys to visionary heavenly realms, and encounters with the presence and spirit of the divine. In Gnostic visions, author and Gnostic scholar Luke A. Myers presents evidence demonstrating how Gnostic visions were created and the connection these visions have to naturally occurring visionary compounds that are still in existence today. The culmination of more than ten years of research, Gnostic Visions advances the understanding of classical ethnobotany, Gnosticism, and the genesis of early Christian history. In this book the author discusses the prehistoric foundations of early human religion as well as the visionary religious traditions of the classical Greeks and Egyptians. Using these as a foundation, the book presents new and never before seen research explaining how Gnostic visions were created and what types of compounds were used by these ancient people to create them. Gnostic Visions presents evidence directly linking visionary Ayahuasca analogs with the creation of Gnostic and Hermetic visionary experiences. Gnostic Visions also describes the decline of Gnosticism, other visionary practices used in the Dark Ages and gives a brief tour of the visionary plants of the new world. In Gnostic visions, Myers tells of his personal experience with the divine and includes some of his own reflections of the importance of mankinds relationship to the natural world. He communicates that altered states of consciousness have been responsible for many of the most profound mystical religious experiences in human history.
Download or read book Living with a Visionary written by John Matthias and published by DOS Madres Press. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his afterword, Igor Webb writes, "The lament, uttered when love and death are most closely bound, is something like an essential accessory to mortality. . . . 'Living with a Visionary' is the poet's account of his, and (and his wife) Diana's, descent into hell (from effects of Parkinson's disease). . . . But it's in 'Some of Her Things,' a fable in the form of a long prose poem, . . . that Matthias most powerfully, and poignantly, deploys his language. . . . it is a courtly threnody for lost time." Literary Nonfiction
Download or read book They Shimmer Within Cognitive Evolutionary Perspectives on Visionary Beings written by Bruce Rimell and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of psychedelic drugs plants is rising, and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. Approaches to these experiences have often been literal, archetypal or dismissive. Evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion suggest innate and non-imagistic mental foundations for these phenomena arising from easily-triggered evolutionary functions during emotive periods of high cognitive demand. Such functions include agent detection, social intelligence faculties and metacognition. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience which rests at the heart of what it is to be human.
Download or read book High Weirdness written by Erik Davis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. 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.
Download or read book Visions from San Francisco Bay written by Czeslaw Milosz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1983-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."
Download or read book Touching Devotional Practices and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages written by David Carrillo-Rangel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of methodological approaches, in order to understand how touch was encoded, evoked and purposefully used. The book further considers how touch was related to the medieval theory of perception, examining its relation to the inner and outer senses through the eyes of visionaries, mystics, theologians and confessors, not only as praxis but from different theoretical points of view. While considered the most basic of spiritual experience, the chapters in this book highlight the all-pervasive presence of touch and the significance of ‘affective piety’ to Late Medieval Christians. Chapter 3: Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond is Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Download or read book Freedom s Coming written by Paul Harvey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.
Download or read book Eschatology in Antiquity written by Hilary Marlow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 979 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the rhetoric and practices surrounding views on life after death and the end of the world, including the fate of the individual, apocalyptic speculation and hope for cosmological renewal, in a wide range of societies from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Byzantine era. The 42 essays by leading scholars in each field explore the rich spectrum of ways in which eschatological understanding can be expressed, and for which purposes it can be used. Readers will gain new insight into the historical contexts, details, functions and impact of eschatological ideas and imagery in ancient texts and material culture from the twenty-fifth century BCE to the ninth century CE. Traditionally, the study of “eschatology” (and related concepts) has been pursued mainly by scholars of Jewish and Christian scripture. By broadening the disciplinary scope but remaining within the clearly defined geographical milieu of the Mediterranean, this volume enables its readers to note comparisons and contrasts, as well as exchanges of thought and transmission of eschatological ideas across Antiquity. Cross-referencing, high quality illustrations and extensive indexing contribute to a rich resource on a topic of contemporary interest and relevance. Eschatology in Antiquity is aimed at readers from a wide range of academic disciplines, as well as non-specialists including seminary students and religious leaders. The primary audience will comprise researchers in relevant fields including Biblical Studies, Classics and Ancient History, Ancient Philosophy, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Art History, Late Antiquity, Byzantine Studies and Cultural Studies. Care has been taken to ensure that the essays are accessible to undergraduates and those without specialist knowledge of particular subject areas.
Download or read book Ellen Harmon White written by Terrie Dopp Aamodt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In America, as in Britain, the Victorian era enjoyed a long life, stretching from the 1830s to the 1910s. It marked the transition from a pre-modern to a modern way of life. Ellen Harmon White's life (1827-1915) spanned those years and then some, but the last three months of a single year, 1844, served as the pivot for everything else. When the Lord failed to return on October 22, as she and other followers of William Miller had predicted, White did not lose heart. Fired by a vision she experienced, White played the principal role in transforming a remnant minority of Millerites into the sturdy sect that soon came to be known as the Seventh-day Adventists. She and a small group of fellow believers emphasized a Saturday Sabbath and an imminent Advent. Today that flourishing denomination posts eighteen million adherents globally and one of the largest education, hospital, publishing, and missionary outreach programs in the world. Over the course of her life White generated 70,000 manuscript pages and letters, and produced 40 books that have enjoyed extremely wide circulation. She ranks as one of the most gifted and influential religious leaders in American history and this volume tells her story in a new and remarkably informative way. Some of the contributors identify with the Adventist tradition, some with other Christian denominations, and some with no religious tradition at all. Their essays call for White to be seen as a significant figure in American religious history and for her to be understood within the context of her times.
Download or read book God s Words Women s Voices written by Rosalynn Voaden and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1999 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of awareness of the ecclesiastical doctrine of discretio spirituum, the means of testing whether visions were truly of divine origin, in the works of medieval women visionaries from Bridget of Sweden to Joan of Arc.
Download or read book Homa Variations written by Richard K. Payne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout human history, and across many religious cultures, offerings are made into fire. The essays collected in Homa Variations provide detailed studies of this practice, known in the tantric world as the "homa," from its inception up to the present.
Download or read book Religious Experience and the Creation of Scripture written by Mark Wreford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the reasons that prompted the New Testament writers to create the texts which would become the formation of the Christian religion, exploring the possibility that certain religious experiences were understood as revelatory, and consequently inspired the writing of texts which were seen as special from their inception. Mark Wreford uses Luke-Acts and Galatians as test-cases within the New Testament, reflecting both on the stated importance of religious experiences – whether the author's own or others' – to the development of these texts, and the status the texts claim for themselves. Wreford suggests that Luke-Acts offers a helpful example of the relationship between religious experience and the creation of Scripture, as an extensive narrative which reflects on early Christian claims to Spirit-inspired witness and which begins with an explicit authorial statement of purpose. Similarly, in Galatians, Paul's autobiographical account of God's revelation of Christ to him is the foundation of a letter that is intended to play an authoritative role in shaping its addressees' own faith and practice. Wreford argues that religious experiences are presented as the driving force behind the creation of the texts, examining how such religious experience links with notions of scripture and canonicity. He then asserts that both Luke and Paul understood themselves to be creating new scriptural writings on the basis of their relationship to new religious experiences, citing the experience and speech at Pentecost, the inclusion of gentiles in the experience, and Paul's own conversion experience as key elements behind the self-understanding of these New Testament authors.
Download or read book Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art written by Victor I. Stoichita and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 1997-06-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and lucid account of how Spanish painters of the 16th and 17th centuries dealt with mystic visions in their art, and of how they attempted to "represent the unrepresentable", Victor Stoichita aims to establish a theory of visionary imagery in Western art in general, and one for the Spanish Counter-Reformation in particular. He reveals how the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation was characterized by a rediscovery of the role of the imagination in the exercise of faith. This had important consequences for painters such as Velazquez, Zurbaran and El Greco, leading to the development of ingenious solutions for visual depictions of mystical experience. This was to crystallize into an overtly meditative and didactic pictorial language. That Spanish painting is both cerebral and passionate is due to the particular historical forces which shaped it. Stoichita's account will be of crucial interest not just to scholars of Spanish art but to anyone interested in how art responds to ideological pressures.
Download or read book Revival Renewal and the Holy Spirit written by Dyfed Wyn Roberts and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revival of 1904-05 had a profound effect not only on Wales, but also on many other nations. This volume of academic papers from the centenary conference in 2004 explores the local and International Impact of the revival as well as previous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Welsh revivals. Contributors include David Bebbington and Mark A. Noll.
