This edited volume explores the intersection of spirituality with childbirth from 1800 to the present day from a comparative perspective. It illustrates how over this time period in much of the world, traditional practices, home births, and midwives have been overshadowed and undermined by male dominated obstetrics, hospitalization, and ultimately the medicalization of the birthing process itself.

Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. Yet the topic of birth remains deeply underrepresented in the humanities, overshadowed by a scholarly focus on death. This book explores how imagery is used ritualistically in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture. Objects central to the book’s study include religious figurines, paintings about birth, and other items representative of pregnancy, crowning, or giving birth that have an historical or original meaning connected to religion. Contemporaryartists are also creating new art in which they represent birth and mothering as nonreligious events that are sacred or divine. Framed through the concept of social ontology, which examines the nature of the social world and studies how people create meaning out of the various objects, images, and processes that make up human social life, the book theorizes a social ontology of birth, focusing on how the meaning of imagery undergoes metamorphosis between the spheres of religion, secularity, nonreligion, and the sacred when used during birth as a rite of passage. Included in the study are more than thirty images of birth, some of which have never been written about before.

Ananda is a bright youngster with a keen and questioning mind who enjoys life. He and friend Sukarma grow together, but circumstances take them along different paths. Sukarma becomes an ascetic, foreasking worldly pleasures, while Ananda encounters frustrations and tragedies. When his father dies, he follows the rituals, but finds them to be of no avail. He rejects all traditional beliefs, proclaims his atheism and becomes a preacher of hedonism. In the end, Ananda and Sukarma are drawn to a confrontation and the opposing worldviews are brought into the open. This is the story of how Ananda became Cârvâka.

Sacred Pregnancy is part a retrospective on changing paradigms of and feminist discourse on motherhood, part sociological study of changing religious demographics and understandings of religious experience in the United States, and part exploration of the spiritual movements and spiritually guided reproductive health services that bring all these themes together. Resting on the premise that motherhood in general and pregnancy specifically should not be brushed aside as beneath intellectual inquiry or as settled subjects, Ann Duncan explores a new form of religious community: a growing number of diverse movements that blend business with a spiritual approach to the reproductive health of women. This new mode of spiritual ritual is centered not around a particular conception of the divine but by the shared experience of pregnancy and birth as sacred rites of passage and women's reproductive health as an avenue toward spiritual experience, community, and even economic opportunity. These spiritual birth movements are an invitation to further investigate and understand not only the social construction of motherhood and the cultural understanding and practice of pregnancy, but also the life-changing experiences of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood and the concomitant desire for religious ritual in the lives of American women.

Globalization has taken the world by storm and has facilitated the unprecedented migrations of the peoples of this world. Whether we like it or not, we will meet foreigners in our communities, schools, universities, buses, and other public places. But, when people migrate they take their religions with them. If people of different religious traditions are to live side by side amicably, interfaith dialogue becomes imperative. But, for people to be able to speak about their own religions with enlightenment and listen to other people's religious beliefs with respect, they must have some basic knowledge of how faiths and believers operate because for some people, religion is inseparably intertwined with their economics, politics, and everyday lives. This book clearly and concisely introduces religious studies to the reader. It makes a strong case for the quest and study of world religions and explores the challenges, controversies, and methodological issues in the study of religions. It also explores other pertinent religious issues such as beliefs, rituals, myths, sacredness, morality, the problem of evil, and interreligious dialogue. Although written from a classroom perspective, this book can be useful to any reader who would like to acquire knowledge of religious issues.