Humans--even those who consider themselves secular or atheists--are utterly seduced by supernatural beliefs. Clay Routledge, an experimental social psychologist who grew up in a deeply religious environment, argues that belief or trust in forces beyond our understanding is natural and rooted in our fears of death. In Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World, Routledge argues that supernatural thinking is adaptive, even healthy, and that it should unite and not divide us.

A black zoology professor, Dr. Rosalie Taylor, is about to hear the news of her husband's death. Seeking to comfort her, an ancient earth spirit, Massassi, inadvertently dislodges the lock that confines Rosalie's spirit to her body. Rosalie discovers that, under certain circumstances, her spirit can escape her body and fly into the night sky, leaving behind the grief and guilt that have taken over Rosalie's life. Upon her spirit's return, Rosalie relives the experience which gives her short-lived exhilaration and pleasure. But her spirit also brings back events from her past, ugly memories that Rosalie suppressed and hid from her husband and children. So with increasing confusion and pain, Rosalie makes funeral arrangements, comforts her snooping college-aged children, hosts her dysfunctional in-laws and plans nightly escapes. Massassi sees danger. Rosalie could die if her spirit stays away too long. She sends three spirits to serve as Rosalie's guardians. Their orders are to keep Rosalie safe, keep her spirit from escaping and make her happy. The guardians believe that her happiness is unobtainable but they devote themselves to these tasks.

Revelation From a Near-Death Experience compares elements of Scripture, science, and personal revelation received during a near-death experience, which leads you to understand why things are the way they are, why you are you, and what your earthly and eternal purpose is. With a touch of good humor, uncharted territories are explored, rarely discussed in today’s churches, through megabytes of Scriptural and personal revelation. If you have ever wondered any of the following, this book is your answer! If God created the world and He is an all-knowing God, why did He create Lucifer who would rebel against Him and become “the devil”? Why did He create Adam and Eve if He knew they would fail? If God is love, how can He allow evil in the world? Who is Jesus anyway and why would His death “save me”? Don’t all religions lead to God? What about the aliens and the UFOs that have supposedly visited us? What about angels and demons; can we see them? Is there such a thing as the “supernatural”? Revelation From a Near-Death Experience provides the answers to life’s hardest questions.

Gender, Supernatural Beings, and the Liminality of Death: Monstrous Males/Fatal Females examines representations of the supernatural dead to demonstrate shifts in the manifestation of gender. Including readings of East Asian detectives/cyborgs, Iranian vampires, and African zombies, among others, This collection offers a multi-faceted look at myth, legend, and popular culture representations of the gendered supernatural from a broad range of international contexts. The contributors show that, as creatures pass through the liminal space of death, their new supernatural forms challenge cultural conceptions of gender, masculinity, and femininity.

Nostalgia is a topic that most lay people are familiar with, but, until recently, few social scientists understood. Once viewed as a disease, nostalgia is now considered to be an important psychological resource. It involves revisiting personally cherished memories that involve close others. When people engage in nostalgia, they experience a boost in positive psychological states such as positive mood, feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, self-continuity, and perceptions of meaning in life. Since nostalgia promotes these positive states, when people experience negative states (such as loneliness or meaninglessness), they use nostalgia to regulate distress. This book explains in detail what nostalgia is, how views of it have changed over time, and how it has been studied by social scientists. It explores issues like how common nostalgia is and whether people differ in their tendency to be nostalgic. It looks at the triggers and inspiration for nostalgia, and the emotional states that are associated with it. Finally, the psychological, social, and behavioral effects of engaging in nostalgia are discussed. This volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the social scientific research into the complex and intriguing phenomenon of nostalgia. It will be of interest to a range of students and researchers in psychology and beyond, and its accessible writing style and engaging anecdotes will also be appreciated by a wider, non-academic audience.