Sowing The Sacred

"Enter the religious landscape of California's industrial agriculture in the 1940s. Anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt's early 1940s reconnaissance tour of the social scene in the little town of Wasco offers us a composite picture of religious institutions in a typical industrial-ag town in the state. Anthropologists and sociologists of the time pointed to the proliferation of Pentecostal churches as evidence of industrial farming's undesirable social outcomes. In particular, they noted the enthusiastic and emotional expressions of Pentecostal services and how the recently dispossessed Dust Bowl or "Okie" migrants flocked into these churches. By the 1940s, Dorothea Lange's photograph of the Okie "Migrant Mother" capturing the pathos of white plight had surfaced and caught the national spotlight. California, many noted, had a migration problem, as many "undesirables" flooded into the state. Women such as the one captured in Lange's photograph "Revival Mother" standing and worshipping with eyes closed and raised hands in a makeshift garage church typified the poverty of Pentecostals described by the university researchers"--

Greek and Roman mythology is forever linked for a myriad of reasons. Historians believe this could be because many of the Roman deities were adopted from the Greek. However, there are many that were not shared and are proudly only Roman, or only Greek. This comprehensive atlas presents dictionary entries about the major gods, heroes, and imaginary creatures of Greek and Roman mythology, along with information on some key historical figures and philosophical schools of thought. In this impressive book, the entries unfold through a pictorial and illustrated journey. Through a robust glossary, sidebars, and thematic introductions the social studies content of this fascinating subject becomes easily digestible, even for the most reluctant reader, while the further reading section inspires future research.

A fascinating story of a subject central to South-East Asian cultures, this book shows how rice shapes the landscapes that the people of South-East Asia see around them and how it contributes to the ordering of their lives. Not only is rice the staple food in most of the region, but the rice-farm determines the rhythm of the year as its major ceremonials mark the changing seasons. Not surprisingly, rice has come to represent fertility, and folk beliefs about how to farm and store rice and their associated rituals are a corner-stone of South-East Asian cultures. In this highly illustrated work, Jacqueline M. Piper details the tremendous impact rice growing has made on the land over millennia, converting mountain, hill, and valley to rice-fields, and providing, through the implements of rice cultivation, many opportunities for craftsmenship, design, and decoration.

Drawing on the Western practices of political religion, the book offers fresh insights into American world politics and into ways of legitimating its hegemonic position to the international community with the help of the cultural resources of the sacred.

How did second-century Christians vie with each other in seeking to produce an authoritative discourse of Christian identity? In this innovative book, Denise Buell argues that many early Christians deployed the metaphors of procreation and kinship in the struggle over claims to represent the truth of Christian interpretation, practice, and doctrine. In particular, she examines the intriguing works of the influential theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-210 c.e.), for whom cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship played an important role in defining which Christians have the proper authority to teach, and which kinds of knowledge are authentic. Buell argues that metaphors of procreation and kinship can serve to make power differentials appear natural. She shows that early Christian authors recognized this and often turned to such metaphors to mark their own positions as legitimate and marginalize others as false. Attention to the functions of this language offers a way out of the trap of reconstructing the development of early Christianity along the axes of "heresy" and "orthodoxy," while not denying that early Christians employed this binary. Ultimately, Buell argues, strategic use of kinship language encouraged conformity over diversity and had a long lasting effect both on Christian thought and on the historiography of early Christianity. Aperceptive and closely argued contribution to early Christian studies, Making Christians also branches out to the areas of kinship studies and the social construction of gender.

This book, The Jewish Calendar Fraud and its accompaniment of a Chart, are the first issues, released as part of the trilogy, showcasing the definitive collection of His Royal Highness Prince Michael A. Kwende’s eschatological repertoire: Delineating world and Biblical chronology, from Creation to the end-times. It’s been said...

"A wide-ranging anthology of ethnopoetry including origin texts, visionary texts, texts about death, texts about events--collected from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Ancient Near East, and Oceania."--Provided by publiher.