"From an armchair in England, Rosenblum hatches a complicated plot to return the world to the year 1580-reintroducing ruffs, doublets, codpieces, and sundry period diseases. By sheer force of will, Littlefield discovers that he's able to crystallize table salt into the shapes of "chickens and other small animals." Babson founds an international organization with the declared aim of annulling the law of gravity. These are only a few of the dozens of eccentrics, visionaries, and downright crackpots who populate the pages of Juan Rodolfo Wilcock's charming fiction in the form of a biographical dictionary. Temple's brief portraits blend mordant satire and profound imaginative sympathy, taking in the whole dazzling spectrum of human folly-including a handful of colors that only Wilcock's Swiftian eye could possibly have perceived" --

"Closer, mortal. You are here, finally, to feed the Aching God..." The days of adventure are passed for Auric Manteo. Retired to the countryside and isolated with his scars and riches, he no longer delves into forbidden ruins seeking dark wisdom and treasure. But just as old nightmares begin plaguing his sleep, he receives an urgent summons back to that old life. To save his only daughter, he must return to the place of his greatest trauma: the haunted Barrowlands. Along with a group of inexperienced companions and an old soldier, he must confront the dangers of the ancient and wicked Djao civilization. He has survived fell beasts, insidious traps, and deadly hazards before. But how can he contend with the malice of a bloodthirsty living god? First volume in the planned epic fantasy trilogy Iconoclasts, Aching God is the debut novel by RPG adventure designer Mike Shel. This volume also includes an advanced preview of Iconoclasts - Book II: Sin Eater.

In Orthodox theology both the icon and the name of God transmit divine energies, theophanies, or revelations that imprint God's image within us. In Icons and the Name of God renowned Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov explains the theology behind the Orthodox veneration of icons and the glorification of the name of God. In the process Bulgakov covers two major controversies -- the iconoclastic controversy (sixth to eighth centuries) and the "Name of God" controversy (early twentieth century) -- and explains his belief that an icon stops being merely a religious painting and becomes sacred when it is named. This translation of two essays "The Icon and Its Veneration" and "The Name of God" -- available in English for the first time -- makes Bulgakov's rich thinking on these key theological concepts available to a wider audience than ever before.

Iconoclasm is not a barbaric act which takes place somewhere else but is instead a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643, which stands at the core of this book.

Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.

"A collection of essays by eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology that track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great's Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of the Orthodox Church"--Provided by publisher.

Why, Salmond asks, would nineteenth-century Hindus who come from an iconic religious tradition voice a kind of invective one might expect from Hebrew prophets, Muslim iconoclasts, or Calvinists? Rammohun was a wealthy Bengali, intimately associated with the British Raj and familiar with European languages, religion, and currents of thought. Dayananda was an itinerant Gujarati ascetic who did not speak English and was not integrated into the culture of the colonizers. Salmond’s examination of Dayananda after Rammohun complicates the easy assumption that nineteenth-century Hindu iconoclasm is simply a case of borrowing an attitude from Muslim or Protestant traditions. Salmond examines the origins of these reformers’ ideas by considering the process of diffusion and independent invention—that is, whether ideas are borrowed from other cultures, or arise spontaneously and without influence from external sources. Examining their writings from multiple perspectives, Salmond suggests that Hindu iconoclasm was a complex movement whose attitudes may have arisen from independent invention and were then reinforced by diffusion. Although idolatry became the symbolic marker of their reformist programs, Rammohun’s and Dayananda’s agendas were broader than the elimination of image-worship. These Hindu reformers perceived a link between image-rejection in religion and the unification and modernization of society, part of a process that Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world.” Focusing on idolatry in nineteenth-century India, Hindu Iconoclasts investigates the encounter of civilizations, an encounter that continues to resonate today.