Spirit Faces is a visionary book about the afterlife based on Mark Macy's fifteen years of research, with special emphasis on a growing collection of unique photographs in which he captures clear faces of nonphysical beings- spirits. These photographs and other results of his research provide some of the first solid evidence, and verifiable proof, that life continues after death of the physical body. Macy weaves his groundbreaking information into a clear picture of life on the other side. He explains in easily digestible terms how loved ones, ancestors, angels, and ghosts all play a part in the affairs of our world, and how we humans can attract the supportive and loving spiritual influences that we desire.

Two human personalities can form a relationship, and, through communication and communion, that relationship can be enhanced. Likewise, a person can form and develop a close relationship with an evil spirit, whether for knowledge or gain. When a person forms a relationship with an evil spirit, he then has a familiar spirit. Familiar spirits are counterfeits of the Holy Spirit's work. Anyone who has fellowship with God, and who is led by the Holy Spirit, does not need a familiar spirit, for God provides him with all that he needs. As with anything occult, involvement with familiar spirits creates spiritual defilement: "Regard not them that have familiar spirits...to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God." Lev. 19:31

This book investigates the psychological toll of conflict in the Middle East during the twentieth century, including discussion of how spiritual and religious frameworks influence practice and theory. The concept of mental health treatment in war-torn Middle Eastern nations is painfully understudied. In Disturbing Spirits, Beverly A. Tsacoyianis blends social, cultural, and medical history research methods with approaches in disability and trauma studies to demonstrate that the history of mental illness in Syria and Lebanon since the 1890s is embedded in disparate—but not necessarily mutually exclusive—ideas about legitimate healing. Tsacoyianis examines the encounters between “Western” psychiatry and local practices and argues that the attempt to implement “modern” cosmopolitan biomedicine for the last 120 years has largely failed—in part because of political instability and political traumas and in part because of narrow definitions of modern medicine that excluded spirituality and locally meaningful cultural practices. Analyzing hospital records, ethnographic data, oral history research, historical fiction, and journalistic nonfiction, Tsacoyianis claims that psychiatrists presented mental health treatment to Syrians and Lebanese not only as a way to control or cure mental illness but also as a modernizing worldview to combat popular ideas about jinn-based origins of mental illness and to encourage acceptance of psychiatry. Treatment devoid of spiritual therapies ultimately delegitimized psychiatry among lower classes. Tsacoyianis maintains that tensions between psychiatrists and vernacular healers developed as political transformations devastated collective and individual psyches and disrupted social order. Scholars working on healing in the modern Middle East have largely studied either psychiatric or non-biomedical healing, but rarely their connections to each other or to politics. In this groundbreaking work, Tsacoyianis connects the discussion of global responsibility to scholarly debates about human suffering and the moral call to caregiving. Disturbing Spirits will interest students and scholars of the history of medicine and public health, Middle Eastern studies, and postcolonial literature.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.

"The first book on Zimbabwean Shona sculpture to be printed in the West will forever change the way you think and feel about contemporary art. Discover the stunning beauty of the stone sculpture, the extraordinary people who create it and the ancient African land which inspires such profound expressions of love and hope."--front cover