Over the last 35 years, practice of Santeria and the Yoruba religion in the United States has grown as the result of African American search for identity and large scale Cuban migration. While the ritual and belief systems of Santeria and the Yoruba Religion are essentially the same, the practical religion of both differs. Both center around questions of group identity and the concerns of their practitioners. This book focuses on the changes in the Yoruba Practical Religion of the Converted in the African American community. Through insighful attention to rich ethnographic detail, the author explores the beliefs, practices, and rituals of this religious community.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Thirteen-year-old New Yorker Rory Hennessy can see things no one else can. When a magician's trick opens his eyes to Mannahatta, Rory finds an amazing spirit city coexisting alongside modern-day Manhattan. A place where Indian sachems, warrior cockroaches, and papier-mƒch‚ children live, ruled by the immortal Gods of Manhattan - including Babe Ruth, Alexander Hamilton, and Peter Stuyvesant. But Rory's power to see Mannahatta brings danger, and he is pursued by enemies, chasing history and trying to free those who have been enslaved. And when he is given the chance to right Mannahatta's greatest wrong, seeing Mannahatta may not be a gift after all. . . .

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century's most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day-in cities and states throughout the country. Edward Larson's classic Summer for the Gods -- winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History -- is the single most authoritative account of this pivotal event. An afterword assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.

The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.

Making the Gods Work for You presents internationally renowned author Caroline W. Casey's remarkable doctrine of Visionary Activist Astrology. In this reverently irreverent mystery school disguised as a book (in which each of the planetary gods is a professor), we are invited to think of our lives as spiritual detective novels. For example, Venus teaches us that our affinities and quirks are clues to our unique mission and contribution to the world. The astrological language of the psyche is a tool for deciphering and revitalizing this sense of mission. Casey teaches you how to expand your range of intimacy with the ten parts of yourself represented by the planets, here called gods. You will learn how to use this language to reverence and feed the forces of your psyche that connect you to very real external forces. This book intends to catalyze a movement to engage the imagination of all people with a sense of humor and a desire to do collaborative good in the world. Expanding on the ideas first presented in her popular audiotape series, Inner and Outer Space, Casey explores the archetypes at the heart of human relationships, aspirations, and spiritual quests. In an engaging narrative enlivened by stories, fables, exercises, and meditations developed through her work as an astrological counselor, she provides a practical system of personal and collective liberation. Making the Gods Work for You provides us with innovative principles to live by and rituals inviting us to become active, dynamic participants in the dance of life. We can then become increasingly conscious players on the team of creation, capable of sharing our gifts with the world at this crucial historical time. From the Trade Paperback edition.