When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen's “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau's underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller's geoscope. Postwar artists and architects have used photography, film, and other media to imagine and record the world as a wonder of collaborative entanglement—to translate the world for the world. In this book, Janine Marchessault examines a series of utopian media events that opened up and expanded the cosmos, creating ecstatic collective experiences for spectators and participants. Marchessault shows that Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” photography exhibition, for example, and Jacques Cousteau’s 1956 underwater film Le monde du silence (The Silent World) both gave viewers a sense of the earth as a shared ecology. The Festival of Britain (1951)—in particular its Telekinema (a combination of 3D film and television) and its Live Architecture exhibition—along with Expo 67’s cinema experiments and media city created an awareness of multiple worlds. Toronto’s alternative microcinema CineCycle, Agnès Varda’s 2000 film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Buckminster Fuller’s World Game (geoscope), representing ecologies of images and resources, encouraged planetary thinking. The transspecies communication platform the Dolphin Embassy, devised by the Ant Farm architecture collaborative, extends this planetary perspective toward other species; and Finnish artist Erkki Kurenniemi’s “Death of the Planet” projects a postanthropocentric future. Drawing on sources that range from the Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marchessault argues that each of these media experiments represents an engagement with connectivity and collectivity through media that will help us imagine a new form of global humanism.

For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art. Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.

In 1967, Montreal hosted Man and His World/Terre des hommes. By far the most successful cultural event ever produced in Canada, it was embraced by the public at the same time as intellectuals from Marshall McLuhan to Umberto Eco hailed it as a new type of exhibition for a new global age. Because it was held where and when it was – on a man-made archipelago in the St Lawrence River seven years into Quebec’s Quiet Revolution – Expo 67 also provided a prism through which the idea of the nation could be refracted and recast in original ways. Misunderstood by some scholars as an expensive exercise in official patriotism, while maligned by Quebec intellectuals as a crypto-federalist distraction from the real business of national independence, the fair nevertheless showcased Montreal as the de facto capital of a suddenly modern Quebec engaging with a late-modern world. Expo 67 and Its World proposes a reappraisal of the 1967 Montreal International and Universal Exhibition across a range of political, social, and cultural spaces: from the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples and what was then known as the Third World, through the aspirations of Montreal, Quebec, and Canada, to the increasingly global ambit of youth culture, medicine, film, and finance. A new approach to understanding Expo 67, the collection challenges assumptions about the significance of the event to Canadian, Québécois, and First Nations history.

Humankind has the capacity and know-how to create Earth-honoring cultures in a new way for new times. Through tapping into ancestral memories, taking what's best from the human potential movement, and collaborating with present day indigenous peoples we can find our way home. Practicing the key ingredients of a lasting culture is an ecstatic way to live. This book shows you how. ,

This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.

Challenging the prevalent view that in order to establish his Dialogical thought Martin Buber had to forsake his earlier mystical work, Israel Koren demonstrates instead that mystical paradigms serve as the foundation for Buber s dialogue and endow it with greater depth. While most scholars portray Buber s dialogical thought mainly in its Western and modern philosophical background, the author examines Buber s interpretation of Hasidic themes such as Devekut (attachment to God) among others, in order to establish that his dialogical writings evolved out of his interpretation of Judaism in general, his understanding of the Hasidic conception of the world and the mission of man in Hasidism in particular. Buber s work is therefore shown to be original mystical neo-Hasidic thought, which serves as a new link in the historical chain of Jewish mysticism.