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"In What Is It Like To Be Dead?, Jens Schlieter argues that to understand recent testimonies of near-death experiences, we need to be aware of the history of innumerable reports of earlier near-death experiences that were communicated and handed down in scores of newspapers, journals, and books. Collections of such testimonies have been published for more than 150 years, accompanied by attempts to classify and interpret them. Schlieter analyzes the...
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"The Church of Scientology is one of the most recognizable American-born new religions, but perhaps the least understood. With academic and popular interest on the rise, many books have been written about Scientology and surely more will follow. Although academics have begun to pay more attention to Scientology, the subject has received remarkably little qualitative attention. Indeed, no work has systematically addressed such questions as: what do...
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"A sizeable minority of people with no particular connection to Eastern religions believe in reincarnation. The rise in popularity of this belief over the last century and a half is the direct result of the impact of the nineteenth-century's largest and most influential Western esoteric movement, the Theosophical Society. In Recycled Lives, Julie Chajes explains and historicises the rebirth doctrines of the matriarch of Theosophy, the controversial...
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"The book offers a study of the genealogy of the concept of "Jewish mysticism." It examines the major developments in the academic study of Jewish mysticism and its impact on modern Kabbalistic movements in the contexts of Jewish nationalism and New Age spirituality. Its central argument is that Jewish mysticism is a modern discursive construct and that the identification of Kabbalah and Hasidism as forms of mysticism, which appeared for the first...