You’ve heard of sacred places, writings, relics, and rituals, holy days and magical times of year. But these are actually representations of relationships that people have with each other and the elements of the world. Some of these relationships environmental: they involve landscapes, animals, and the streets of your home town. Some are personal, such as families, friends, and elders. Some are public, involving musicians, storytellers, medical doctors, and even soldiers. This book studies twenty-two relationships, from a variety of traditions, and shows their place in ‘the good life’. Yet these relations are always fragile, and threatened by fears, from the fear of loneliness, to the fear of the loss of personal or political freedom, to the fear of death. To escape from these fears, people often trap themselves into ways of life that are bad for everyone, including themselves. This book studies how that happens, and how to prevent it. More than beliefs, laws, and teachings, our relationships are the true basis of spirituality, and freedom.

What is civilization, and is it a good thing? It’s a name for the most glorious of humanity’s monuments and cultural achievements; yet it also speaks of the conquests, oppressions, and empires which make their glory possible. This book explains the essence of civilization, then asks what’s wrong with it, and considers what can be done about it.

Even in pagan antiquity, there were those who, while participating in the community's religious life, did not believe in literal gods. In the centuries that followed the Christian domination of the West, the epithet "godless pagan" was leveled at a wide variety of people. In the 1960s, there emerged a community of people who sought to reclaim the name "pagan" from its history of opprobrium. These Neo-Pagans were interested in nature spirituality and polytheism, and identified with the misunderstood and persecuted pagans of antiquity. While many Pagans today believe in literal gods, there are a growing number of Pagans who are "godless." Today, the diverse assemblage of spiritual paths known as Paganism includes atheist Pagans or Atheopagans, Humanistic and Naturalistic Pagans, Buddho-Pagans, animists, pantheists, Gaians, and other non-theistic Pagans. Here, their voices are gathered together to share what it means to be Pagan and godless.

Exceptionally clear and well-written chapters provide engaging discussions of the methods of accessing, generating, and analyzing social science data, using methods ranging from reflexive historical analysis to critical ethnography. Reflecting on their own research experiences, the contributors offer an inside, applied perspective on how research topics, evidence, and methods intertwine to produce knowledge in the social sciences.

Bringing together works by Salvador Espriu, Juan Goytisolo, Mercè Rodoreda, Esther Tusquets, and Juan Marsa that portray memory as a disorienting narrative enterprise, Colleen Culleton argues that the source of this disorientation is the material reality of life in Barcelona in the immediate post-Civil War years. Barcelona was the object of harsh persecution in the first years of the Franco regime that included the erasure of marks of Catalan identity and cultural history from the urban landscape and made Barcelona a moving target for memory. The literature and film she examines show characters struggling to produce narratives of the remembered past that immediately conflict with the dominant version of Spain's historical narrative formulated to legitimize the Civil War. Culleton suggests the trope of the laberinto, used as an image or device in all five of the works she considers and translated into English as both maze and labyrinth, opens up a space that enables readers to take vulnerability to outside interference into account as an inseparable part of remembrance. While the narratives all have maze-like qualities involving a high level of reader participation and choice, the exigencies of the labyrinth with its unicursal demands for patience, perseverance, and faith always prevail. Thus do the Francoist narrative and social structure in the end resurface and reassert themselves over the narrating character's perspective.