Have you ever looked at the clock and been surprised at how often it says 11.11 or 2.22 or 3.33? The 11:11 Code tells the story of yoga teacher Hilary Carter, who was brave enough to follow the coincidences around numbers to see what would happen. To her amazement the number signs, in particular 11.11, led her to buy an ancient convent in Andalucia, Spain. The problems this led her to were in a different league to the normal restoring old continental properties so common on our TV screens today. Her financial backer died, her first builder ended up in prison and her second builder was paralyzed in a tragic accident. But that scratches the surface. Formerly a home to the Knights Templar, the building was both haunted and seemed to have a will of its own.

Have you ever looked at the clock and been surprised at how often it says 11.11 or 2.22 or 3.33? The 11:11 Code tells the story of yoga teacher Hilary Carter, who was brave enough to follow the coincidences around numbers to see what would happen. To her amazement the number signs, in particular 11.11, led her to buy an ancient convent in Andalucia, Spain. The problems this led her to were in a different league to the normal restoring old continental properties so common on our TV screens today. Her financial backer died, her first builder ended up in prison and her second builder was paralyzed in a tragic accident. But that scratches the surface. Formerly a home to the Knights Templar, the building was both haunted and seemed to have a will of its own.

The journal of strange phenomena.

A true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent. In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of Sant’Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent’s beautiful young mistress, Maria Luisa. Having convinced those under her charge that she was having regular visions and heavenly visitations, Maria Luisa began to lead and coerce her novices into lesbian initiation rites and heresies. She entered into a highly eroticized relationship with a young theologian known as Padre Peters—urging him to dispense upon her, in the privacy and sanctity of the confessional box, what the two of them referred to as the “special blessing.” What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical significance, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing on written testimony and original documents, Professor Wolf—Germany’s leading scholar of the Catholic Church, and among the very first scholars to be granted access to the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the office of the Inquisition—tells the incredible story of how one woman was able to perpetrate deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Church itself.

Explores the interplay between law and religion in the area of hate speech, whether religion is the target or source.

Through every era of American history, New York City has been a battleground for international espionage, where secrets are created, stolen, and passed through clandestine meetings and covert communications. Some spies do their work and escape, while others are compromised, imprisoned, and--a few--executed. Spy Sites of New York City takes you inside this shadowy world and reveals the places where it all happened. In 233 main entries as well as listings for scores more spy sites, H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace weave incredible true stories of derring-do and double-crosses that put even the best spy fiction to shame. The cases and sites follow espionage history from the Revolutionary War and Civil War, to the rise of communism and fascism in the twentieth century, to Russian sleeper agents in the twenty-first century. The spy sites are not only in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx but also on Long Island and in New Jersey. Maps and 380 photographs allow readers to follow in the footsteps of spies and spy-hunters to explore the city, tradecraft, and operations that influenced wars hot and cold. Informing and entertaining, Spy Sites of New York City is a must-have guidebook to the espionage history of the Big Apple.