San Antonio College Library

A guide to the history, beliefs, rituals, and culture of a religious tradition that, despite persecution, suppression, and its own secretive nature, has close to a million adherents in the United States alone. Santería is a religion with Afro-Cuban roots, rising out of the cultural clash between the Yoruba people of West Africa and the Spanish Catholics who brought them to the Americas as slaves. With the exile of thousands of Cubans after Castro's...

"This path-breaking book tells the story of American metaphysical religion more fully than it has ever been told before, along the way significantly revising the panorama of American religious history. Catherine L. Albanese follows metaphysical traditions from Renaissance Europe to England and then America, where they have flourished from colonial days to the twenty-first century, blending often with African, Native American, and other cultural elements."--Jacket....

In 45 short essays aimed at a broad audience, the contributors to From the Ashes place the Branch Davidians in historical and comparative perspective with nontraditional religions, analyze the government's handling of the Waco confrontation, assess the media's coverage and public response, and provide an overview of responses from the academic and religious community. Although the contributors represent a wide variety of viewpoints, they are united...

Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western...

Publisher description: Teaching Spirits offers a thematic approach to Native American religious traditions. Within the great multiplicity of Native American cultures, Joseph Epes Brown has perceived certain common themes that resonate within many Native traditions. He demonstrates how themes within native traditions connect with each other, at the same time upholding the integrity of individual traditions. Brown illustrates each of these themes with...