This sensitive and imaginative study explores the phenomenon of conversion in three major religious autobiographies: the Confessions of Saint Augustine, Grace Abounding by John Bunyan, and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. These three religious figures could hardly be more different, and yet, as Hawkins shows, their conversion narratives are remarkably similar in patterns of theme, figure, and action. This archetypal approach is particularly appropriate to spiritual autobiography, which is less concerned with "self" than with "soul" and which seeks to relate the individual to a divine reality that is universal and timeless. Hawkins' approach to these texts is sophisticated, yet free of jargon and doctrinaire psychologizing. Here, archetypal analysis becomes not an end in itself, but also a means to investigate the complexity of the individual text. Hawkins' archetypal analysis serves not only to discern continuities, but also to explore cultural, ideological, and psychological variations. Adapting William James's distinction between crisis and lysis conversion, Hawkins shows that the conversion paradigm central to each autobiography determines its religious meaning, its formal structure, and its archetypal emphases. The author approaches the phenomena of conversion with a blend of critical detachment and imaginative sympathy. She is always careful to honor the authenticity of religious experience, and for this reason her commentary succeeds in illuminating it. The result is an interdisciplinary study that will appeal to the psychologist and literary critic as well as the student of religion. But these narratives of conversion offer paradigms that apply to any deeply significant change, for they are of interest and concern to all readers seeking to find meaning in their lives. Hawkins makes us feel both the immediacy and the permanence of these texts, for "What is human in them speaks to what is human in us."

Looking at a wide variety of religions, this work offers an exploration of religious conversion. The phenomena is approached from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, theology and anthropology.

This study offers a fresh reading of religious conversion by analyzing a variety of "missionaries" that sought to influence the Montagnard-Dega refugee. Thomas Pearson uses ethnographic and archival research to tell the story of cross-cultural contact in the highlands during the Vietnam War, Christian conversion, refugee exile, and the formation of the Dega refugee community in the United States. His insightful study considers not just evangelicals and Catholics, but humanitarian workers in the highlands, refugee resettlement volunteers in the United States, and the American Special Forces soldiers. This book makes the case that the Dega have appropriated the anthropological and religious discourses of this disparate group of missionaries to recreate themselves through a multivalent "conversion."

In The Soul of Popular Culture, leading writers and critics, many of them influenced by the thought of C. G. Jung, draw upon the insights of depth psychology to delve into the meanings of TV programs like Star Trek and Fawlty Towers, movies such as The Piano and The Silence of the Lambs, and other contemporary media, as well as the public preoccupation with such issues as abortion, AIDS, the O.J. Simpson trial, and our enduring fascination with Elvis.

Graphics Gems IV contains practical techniques for 2D and 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and image processing. The book presents articles on polygons and polyhedral; a mix of formulas, optimized algorithms, and tutorial information on the geometry of 2D, 3D, and n-D space; transformations; and parametric curves and surfaces. The text also includes articles on ray tracing; shading 3D models; and frame buffer techniques. Articles on image processing; algorithms for graphical layout; basic interpolation methods; and subroutine libraries for vector and matrix algebra are also demonstrated. Computer engineers and designers will find the book invaluable.

The Near Death Experience: A Reader is the most comprehensive collection of NDE cases and interpretations ever assembled. This book encompasses a broad range of disciplines: psychological researchers discuss cognitive models and Jungian theories of meaningful archetypal phenomena; the biological perspectivedescribes how brains near death may produce soothing endorphins, optical illusions, and convincing hallucinations. Philosophers present empirical analyses and images in archetypal theories, and the symbolic language of comparative phenomenological theories. Christian, Jewish and Mormon responses to NDEs outline the religious perspective, and the mystical and spiritual interpretations of NDEs are also explored.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Databases in Networked Information Systems, DNIS 2013, held in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan in March 2013. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The workshop generally puts the main focus on data semantics and infrastructure for information management and interchange. The papers are organized in topical sections on cloud-based database systems; information and knowledge management; information extraction from data resources; bio-medical information management; and networked information systems: infrastructure.