Faced with the contemporary proliferation of a "religion of emotional communities" and the multiplication of gurus, spiritual directors and masters, the psychologist of religion should question the impact of the paternal function on the structuring of religious experience. This question is examined here within the context of ancient monasticism and on the basis of ascetic sources (mainly the Ladder of John Climacus, 7th c.), as well as by means of the analysis of rituals such as baptism and monastic profession. The author demonstrates that the spiritual father refers to paternity as function, and that this function is both structural and structuring with respect to religious experience. It is also examined how this crossroads-concept of fatherhood is linked to other psychic realities such as the maternal dimension of religious desire and the role of the community, the relations between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, the paternal uncertainty, the articulation of the mystical desire with the Law, and the control of sexuality. This study shows the importance of this function for bringing together structure and development in the religious experience and indicates the risks of this paternity for a religious pathology.

Luigi Zoja views the origin and evolution of the father from a Jungian perspective. He argues that the father's role in bringing up children is a social construction that has been subject to change throughout history - and looks at the consequences of this, along with the crisis facing fatherhood today. The Father will be welcomed by people from a wide variety of disciplines, including practitioners and students of psychology, sociology and anthropology, and by the educated general reader.

This book offers a provocative rereading of the early history of Chan Buddhism (Zen). Working from a history-of-religions point of view that asks how and why certain literary tropes were chosen to depict the essence of the Buddhist tradition to Chinese readers, this analysis focuses on the narrative logics of the early Chan genealogies—the seventh-and eighth-century lineage texts that claimed that certain high-profile Chinese men were descendents of Bodhidharma and the Buddha. This book argues that early Chan's image of the perfect-master-who-owns-tradition was constructed for reasons that have little to do with Buddhist practice, new styles of enlightened wisdom, or "orthodoxy," and much more to do with politics, property, geography, and, of course, new forms of writing.

This volume attempts an objective reassessment of the controversial works and life of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Ignoring secondary accounts and various received truths, Gavin Callaghan goes back to the weird texts themselves, and follows where Lovecraft leads him: into an arcane world of parental giganticism and inverted classicism, in which Lovecraft's parental obsessions were twisted into the all-powerful cosmic monsters of his imaginary cosmology.

After decades of focusing on the mother's role in parenting, family studies researchers have turned their attention to the role of the father in parenting and family development. The results shed new light on childhood development and question conventional wisdom by showing that beyond providing the more traditional economic support of the family, fathers do indeed matter when it comes to raising a child. Stemming from a series of workshops and publications sponsored by the Family and Child Well-Being Network, under the federal fatherhood initiative of the National Institute of Child Health and Development, this comprehensive volume focuses on ways of measuring the efficacy of father involvement in different scenarios, using different methods of assessment and different populations. In the process, new research strategies and new parental paradigms have been formulated to include paternal involvement. Moreover, this volume contains articles from a variety of influences while addressing the task of finding the missing pieces of the fatherhood construct that would work for new age, as well as traditional and minority fathers. The scope of this discussion offers topics of interest to basic researchers, as well as public policy analysts.

Recounts the events of six historic festivals in San Antonio, Texas, at the end of the nineteenth century, describing each event's pageantry, parades, competitions, and participants.

The existence and changing of generations in family life, business and politics was a central feature of towns as well as rural societies in earlier times. Even so, it remains understudied by urban historians of the pre-modern period. This book aims to fill some of this gap, containing twelve studies of generations in late medieval and early modern European towns, ranging from the Mediterranean to the Nordic countries, with a time-span from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. Dealing with topics like succession and inheritance, family consciousness, as well as relations and conflicts within and between generations, the articles demonstrate the importance and potential of generational studies on pre-modern towns. The book will appeal to anyone who takes an interest in urban social and cultural history, legal and family history in medieval and early modern times.