Introducing two Stringfellow/Towne reprints about Bishop Pike: The Bishop Pike Affair The Death and Life of Bishop Pike The Death and Life of Bishop Pike is an in-depth, documented portrait of James A. Pike--the most controversial American clergyman of modern times. Based on prodigious research into private letters and unpublished documents, as well as exhaustive interviews, it is a biography so candid that the book itself is bound to be controversial. The authors are utterly frank about the bishop's turbulent personal life--his three marriages, his sexuality, his alcoholism, the suicides of his oldest son and of an intimate associate, the temptation of his celebrity, his complex relationship with his mother, and his terrible death in the wilderness. They have thoroughly investigated his notorious experiences with "psychic phenomena"--arriving at their own startling and provocative conclusions. Nevertheless, this book is neither an expose nor an apologia. It is an honest, dramatic, and compelling testament to an extraordinary and vital personality--to the colorful and courageous Christian witness of Bishop James A. Pike, whose advocacy of social justice and whose search for faith--restless and unorthodox as it was--had an astonishing impact on the contemporary church.

James A. Pike, the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, was a man of many faces. To some he was an iconoclast, a man decades ahead of his time who modernized the Church and rendered it more progressive and open to inquiry. To others he was a heretic, who polarized and desecrated the Church. Always controversial and charismatic, he took America by storm in the 1960s with his best-selling books, and his weekly television talk show, Dean Pike, which won him a cover story in Time. A Passionate Pilgrim is an illuminating biography of Pike, and an examination of the tragedies, triumphs, and difficulties that shaped his spectacular rise to fame and his mysterious death in the Israeli desert.

Introducing two Stringfellow/Towne reprints about Bishop Pike: The Bishop Pike Affair The Death and Life of Bishop Pike The Bishop Pike Affair presents the climactic showdown between James A. Pike and his peers at the Wheeling meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops, in October 1966. It dramatized for millions the struggles for reform and relevance within the church in the mid-twentieth century. This book reveals the whole chronicle of the historic controversy. Thousands of documents were researched. The authors disentangle the web of political, racial, theological, traditional, and personal interests that account for the accusation that Bishop Pike is a heretic and that culminated in his censure at Wheeling. The authors relate The Bishop Pike Affair to celebrated heresy trials of the past, probe the issues of fairness and due process of law, explore the ethics of the fraternity of bishops, examine the dynamics of the Episcopal Church as an institution, and expose the design of the ultra-right whites to stage a coup d'eglise in America.

Introducing new reprints by and about Bishop James Pike: The Other Side Search The Other Side is a moving narrative of a father's efforts to save his son from enslavement to psychedelic drugs, a tragic story of a young and gifted man's premature death, a startling story of poltergeist occurrences that led the father and other witnesses to believe that from beyond the grave his son was trying to get in touch, a detailed account of how this communication proceeded during a time when the father was under accusation for heresy for believing too little. Above all, it is an analysis by one of America's keenest minds of what all these experiences may mean. The Other Side certainly reads like a suspenseful novel, yet every phrase of the narration is painstakingly documented by eyewitness accounts of the strange occurrences that led the Bishop Pike to consult mediums in England and America, and by several word-for-word tape recordings of such seances. All readers will find here an honest and lucid exploration of psychic phenomena, and those who have lost a loved one to suicide will find reason to take heart and find hope.

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.