In this fascinating work of religious criticism, Harold Bloom examines a number of American-born faiths: Pentecostalism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Southern Baptism and Fundamentalism, and African-American spirituality. He traces the distinctive features of American religion while asking provocative questions about the role religion plays in American culture and in each American’s concept of his or her relationship to God. Bloom finds that our spiritual beliefs provide an exact portrait of our national character.
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called “probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world.” After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom’s books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he derided as the “school of resentment” (multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and others). He was educated at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and Cornell University.
“The clearer and more manifest divine things are in themselves, the more they are naturally obscure and hidden from the soul. It is here like natural light: […] the more we want to stare directly at the sun, the more we dazzle the visual power and deprive it of light […]. Likewise, when this divine light of contemplation invests the soul which is not yet completely enlightened, it produces spiritual darkness in it, because not only does it exceed it, but because it deprives it of its natural intelligence. and obscures the act. »
On the mystical path, the experience of night is neither dark, nor dramatic, nor tragic. This magnificent poetic treatise shows, on the contrary, that she is the recipient of divine lessons. A major work of the negative path.
« Plus les choses divines sont en soi claires et manifestes, plus elles sont naturellement obscures et cachées à l’âme. Il en est ici comme de la lumière naturelle : […] plus on veut fixer le soleil en face, et plus on éblouit la puissance visuelle et on la prive de lumière […]. De même, quand cette divine lumière de la contemplation investit l’âme qui n’est pas encore complètement éclairée, elle produit en elle des ténèbres spirituelles, parce que non seulement elle la dépasse, mais parce qu’elle la prive de son intelligence naturelle et en obscurcit l’acte. »
Sur le chemin mystique, l’expérience de la nuit n’est ni noire, ni dramatique, ni tragique. Ce magnifique traité poétique montre au contraire qu’elle est réceptrice de leçons divines. Une œuvre majeure de la voie négative.
St. John of the Cross (Spanish: Juan de la Cruz), born June 24 1542, Juan de Yepes Álvarez, was a major Counter-Reformation figure, a Spanish mystic, Catholic saint, Carmelite friar and priest. He was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered, along with St Teresa of Ávila, as a founder of the Discalced Carmelites. He’s also known for his writings. Both his poetry & his studies on the growth of the soul are considered the summit of mystical Spanish literature & a peak of all Spanish literature. He was canonized as a saint in 1726 by Pope Benedict XIII. He is one of the 33 Doctors of the Church.
Since the English translation first appeared in 1923, Rudolf Otto’s volume has established itself as a classic in the field of religious philosophy. It offers an in-depth inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.
German theologian, philosopher, and historian of religion, who exerted worldwide influence through his investigation of man’s experience of the holy. Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy, 1923) is his most important work.
In the manner of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Freud argued that religion and science were mortal enemies. Early in the century, he began to think about religion psychoanalytically and to discuss it in his writings. The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud’s best known and most emphatic psychoanalytic exploration of religion, is the culmination of a lifelong pattern of thinking.
Dr. Sigismund Freud, M.D. (University of Vienna)—later changed to Sigmund—was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential—and controversial—minds of the 20th century.
In 1873, Freud began to study medicine at the University of Vienna. After graduating, he worked at the Vienna General Hospital. He collaborated with Josef Breuer in treating hysteria by the recall of painful experiences under hypnosis. In 1885, Freud went to Paris as a student of the neurologist Jean Charcot. On his return to Vienna the following year, Freud set up in private practice, specialising in nervous and brain disorders. The same year he married Martha Bernays, with whom he had six children.
Freud developed the theory that humans have an unconscious in which sexual and aggressive impulses are in perpetual conflict for supremacy with the defences against them. In 1897, he began an intensive analysis of himself. In 1900, his major work The Interpretation of Dreams was published in which Freud analysed dreams in terms of unconscious desires and experiences.
In 1902, Freud was appointed Professor of Neuropathology at the University of Vienna, a post he held until 1938. Although the medical establishment disagreed with many of his theories, a group of pupils and followers began to gather around Freud. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded with Carl Jung, a close associate of Freud’s, as the president. Jung later broke with Freud and developed his own theories.
After World War One, Freud spent less time in clinical observation and concentrated on the application of his theories to history, art, literature and anthropology. In 1923, he published The Ego and the Id, which suggested a new structural model of the mind, divided into the ‘id, the ‘ego’ and the ‘superego’.
In 1933, the Nazis publicly burnt a number of Freud’s books. In 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, Freud left Vienna for London with his wife and daughter Anna.
Freud had been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, and underwent more than 30 operations. He died of cancer on 23 September 1939.
These writings reflect Falconer’s real-life experiences – raw, intimate, and often intense dialogues with Spirit – filtered through the lens of someone who has walked the path of deep personal healing. With more than 50 years of experience as a spiritual healer, Bob brings hard-won and compassionate authenticity to his work. His direct relationship with the Spirit Realm has anchored his healing practice and his recovery from extreme childhood abuse, creating a solid spiritual foundation that he carries through even the darkest of times.
Mark Booth offers an alternative view, showing us how the great geniuses of modern science, from Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, and Albert Einstein to today’s architects of AI, turned instead to secret, mystical, and “higher” teachings, including Indian mysticism and Freemasonry, to make sense of the strange phenomena they were encountering. Experimenting with alternative states of consciousness, they risked isolation and even madness.
In this edited volume, Sharon Mijares and her colleagues explore approaches to mental health that integrate psychology with spiritual practices such as meditation, mindfulness, and yoga. The book examines alternative perspectives on a wide range of psychological disorders while emphasizing treatment of the whole person rather than symptoms alone. Drawing on case studies and the experience of leading clinicians, it offers practical insights into psychospiritual methods of healing and transformation.
This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian emigre-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-86). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures & drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade’s “The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible & compelling the religious expressions & activities of a wide variety of archaic & “primitive” religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to the “archaic” is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary imagination of what it is to be human.
Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L’ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
In the oral and written histories of every culture, there are countless records of men and women who have displayed extraordinary physical, mental, and spiritual capacities. In modern times, those records have been supplemented by scientific studies of exceptional functioning.
Are the limits of human growth fixed?
Are extraordinary abilities latent within everyone?
Is there evidence that humanity has unrealized capacities for self-transcendence?
Are there specific practices through which ordinary people can develop these abilities?
Michael Murphy has studied these questions for over thirty years.
In The Future of the Body, he presents evidence for metanormal perception, cognition, movement, vitality, and spiritual development from more than 3,000 sources. Surveying ancient and modern records in medical science, sports, anthropology, the arts, psychical research, comparative religious studies, and dozens of other disciplines, Murphy has created an encyclopedia of exceptional functioning of body, mind, and spirit. He paints a broad and convincing picture of the possibilities of further evolutionary development of human attributes.
By studying metanormal abilities under a wide range of conditions, Murphy suggests that we can identify those activities that typically evoke these capacities and assemble them into a coherent program of transformative practice.
A few of Murphy’s central observations and proposal
Bestselling author Michael Murphy has been called the father of the human potential movement, one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century American culture. His bestselling book Golf in the Kingdom (1972) inspired the creation of the Shivas Irons Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to finding beauty and discovery through the game of golf, and has recently been adapted into a movie starring Malcolm McDowell (2010). His other books include Jacob Atabet (1977), An End to Ordinary History (1982), In the Zone (1995), and The Kingdom of Shivas Irons (1997). He lives in California.
“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her landmark treatise on the intelligence of emotions, “they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”
Two decades later, this elemental truth about the nature of living things has migrated from the realm of philosophy to the realm of physical science as we discover that feeling gave rise to sentience and not the other way around, as we reckon with the inner life of dogs, as we concede wonder-smitten that something not mechanistic but mysterious and lush with feeling is animating the bowerbird’s astonishing enchantment in blue.
Out of this recognition has arisen a new biology that is revolutionizing everything we thought we knew about life, just as the revelation of the quantum realm a century ago revolutionized everything we thought we knew about matter — a biology of feeling and interdependence, in which everything alive is in conviviality with everything else, part of a vast symphony of vitality sonorous with feeling.
A century and a half after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology to give shape to the interlaced foundation of the living world, the German marine biologist and cultural scholar Andreas Weber explores this new understanding of life in The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (public library) — a nuanced and deeply original inquiry into the fundamental question of what life is, how it lives itself in us, and what part we play in the grand symphony.
Organisms are not clocks assembled from discrete, mechanical pieces; rather, they are unities held together by a mighty force: feeling what is good or bad for them. Biology… is discovering how the individual experiencing self is connected with all life and how this meaningful self must be seen as the basic principle of organic existence… Feeling and experience are not human add-ons to an otherwise meaningless biosphere. Rather, selves, meaning and imagination are the guiding principles of ecological functioning. The biosphere is made up of subjects with their idiosyncratic points of view and emotions. Scientists have started to recognize that only when they understand organisms as feeling, emotional, sentient systems that interpret their environments — and not as automatons slavishly obeying stimuli — can they ever expect answers to the great enigmas of life.
At the heart of Weber’s view of life is his notion of poetic ecology — an ecology in its recognition that “all life builds on relations and unfolds through mutual transformations,” and poetic in its understanding of feeling and expression not as epiphenomena or observer’s bias, as Western science has assumed at least since Descartes, but as “necessary dimensions of the existential reality of organisms.”
Poetic ecology restores the human to its rightful place within “nature” — without sacrificing the otherness, the strangeness and the nobility of other beings. It can be read as a scientific argument that explains why the deep wonder, the romantic connection and the feeling of being at home in nature are legitimate — and how these experiences help us to develop a new view of life as a creative reality that is based on our profound, first-person observations of ecological relations. Poetic ecology allows us to find our place in the grand whole again.
This understanding provides us with a home in the wilderness again, in the creative natura naturans, that so many people are longing for in their private lives, that they create in their gardens, that they visit during hikes in the wilderness and that they seek to protect.
Much of this biological cosmogony rests upon the legacy of the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, whose Gaia hypothesis gave shape to the then-radical insight that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact,” and that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” Central to it also E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis — the idea that we, with all our feeling and sentience, evolved to seek connection with the rest of nature.
Nature… is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts.
[…]
All our qualities — and particularly the most human ones like our need to be in connection, to be perceived as an individual, to be welcomed by other life and give life, in short, our need to love — spring forth from an organic “soil.” We are part of a web of meaningful inter-penetrations of being that are corporeal and psychologically real at the same time. Humans can only fully comprehend their own inwardness if they understand their existence as cultural beings who are existentially tied to the symbolic processes active inside nature.
There is consolation in this view of life, this fidelity to the natural poetics of ecology — it gives us a more spacious way of bearing our own mortality. A century after the dying Tolstoy took solace in the knowledge that in nature “when existing forms are destroyed, this only means a new form is taking shape,” Weber reflects:
Perhaps the most important psychological role that other beings play is to help us reconcile ourselves with our pain, our inevitable separation as individuals from the remainder of the web of life and our ephemeral existences. The primal feature of nature is that it always rises again, bringing forth new life. Even the most devastating catastrophe gives way over time to green shoots of rebirth and productivity and therefore to hope for ourselves.
In consonance with Carson’s passionate belief in wonder as the antidote to self-destruction, Weber insists that owning up to our interrelation with the rest of life — to the fact that each of us is a living verse in the epic poem of nature — is our only path to our planetary salvation:
The conceptual framework that we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our environmental catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to its actual character… The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.
“I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son. “
–John, the disciple whom Jesus loved
Translated by Frederik Wisse
The teaching of the savior, and the revelation of the mysteries and the things hidden in silence, even these things which he taught John, his disciple.
And it happened one day, when John, the brother of James – who are the sons of Zebedee – had come up to the temple, that a Pharisee named Arimanius approached him and said to him, “Where is your master whom you followed?” And he said to him, “He has gone to the place from which he came.” The Pharisee said to him, “With deception did this Nazarene deceive you (pl.), and he filled your ears with lies, and closed your hearts (and) turned you from the traditions of your fathers.”
When I, John, heard these things I turned away from the temple to a desert place. And I grieved greatly in my heart, saying, “How then was the savior appointed, and why was he sent into the world by his Father, and who is his Father who sent him, and of what sort is that aeon to which we shall go? For what did he mean when he said to us, ‘This aeon to which you will go is of the type of the imperishable aeon, but he did not teach us concerning the latter, of what sort it is.”
Straightway, while I was contemplating these things, behold, the heavens opened and the whole creation which is below heaven shone, and the world was shaken. I was afraid, and behold I saw in the light a youth who stood by me. While I looked at him, he became like an old man. And he changed his likeness (again), becoming like a servant. There was not a plurality before me, but there was a likeness with multiple forms in the light, and the likenesses appeared through each other, and the likeness had three forms.
He said to me, “John, John, why do you doubt, or why are you afraid? You are not unfamiliar with this image, are you? – that is, do not be timid! – I am the one who is with you (pl.) always. I am the Father, I am the Mother, I am the Son. I am the undefiled and incorruptible one. Now I have come to teach you what is and what was and what will come to pass, that you may know the things which are not revealed and those which are revealed, and to teach you concerning the unwavering race of the perfect Man. Now, therefore, lift up your face, that you may receive the things that I shall teach you today, and may tell them to your fellow spirits who are from the unwavering race of the perfect Man.”
This translation was made by Frederik Wisse, excerpted from The Nag Hammadi Library in English edited by James M. Robinson, and transcribed for online publication originally at the Gnostic Society Library (gnosis.org).
The Energies of Men is a collection of essays written by American philosopher and psychologist, William James. The book explores the concept of human energy and its impact on various aspects of life including creativity, productivity, and motivation. James argues that energy is not just physical, but also mental and emotional, and that it is essential for achieving success and happiness in life. He examines the role of energy in different activities such as sports, art, and religion, and discusses the factors that affect energy levels such as diet, exercise, and emotional states. The book also delves into the idea of willpower and how it can be harnessed to increase energy levels and achieve goals. Overall, The Energies of Men is a thought-provoking and insightful read that offers practical advice on how to maximize one’s energy and potential.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world’s literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the “Father of American psychology”. Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James’ work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.
He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he
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Organisms are not clocks assembled from discrete, mechanical pieces; rather, they are unities held together by a mighty force: feeling what is good or bad for them. Biology… is discovering how the individual experiencing self is connected with all life and how this meaningful self must be seen as the basic principle of organic existence… Feeling and experience are not human add-ons to an otherwise meaningless biosphere. Rather, selves, meaning and imagination are the guiding principles of ecological functioning. The biosphere is made up of subjects with their idiosyncratic points of view and emotions. Scientists have started to recognize that only when they understand organisms as feeling, emotional, sentient systems that interpret their environments — and not as automatons slavishly obeying stimuli — can they ever expect answers to the great enigmas of life.
