› › Mission And Ecstasy

Lost Ecstasy

Author : June McDaniel

Publisher : Springer

Page : 331 pages

File Size : 29,13 MB

Release : 2018-06-26

Category : Religion

ISBN : 331992771X

Get eBook

Book Description

This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.



Mission and Ecstasy

Author : Magnus Lundberg

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 25,11 MB

Release : 2015

Category : Latin America

ISBN : 9789150624434

Get eBook

Book Description

The author explores the relationship between contemplative and apostolic aspects of religious life in accounts by and about religious women in the Spanish Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.



Chemical Cowboys

Author : Lisa Sweetingham

Publisher : Ballantine Books

Page : 474 pages

File Size : 38,15 MB

Release : 2009-02-24

Category : True Crime

ISBN : 0345509773

Get eBook

Book Description

In 1995, after receiving a tip from an informant that a new drug called Ecstasy was being pushed in Manhattan’s nightclubs, DEA agent Robert Gagne embarked on a mission to unravel one of the world’s most lucrative drug-trafficking networks. Chemical Cowboys tracks Gagne as he infiltrates New York’s club scene, uncovering a multimillion-dollar criminal empire that spans continents. At its helm is Oded “Fat Man” Tuito, an Israeli fugitive and elusive drug kingpin who combines Wall Street business savvy with old-fashioned street smarts and a taste for violence. A taut behind-the-scenes glimpse into an international criminal enterprise, Chemical Cowboys is a riveting tale of one man’s obsessive pursuit of justice—and the personal cost of that obsession.



Ecstasy in the Classroom

Author : Ayelet Even-Ezra

Publisher : Fordham Univ Press

Page : 287 pages

File Size : 44,72 MB

Release : 2018-12-04

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0823281930

Get eBook

Book Description

Can ecstatic experiences be studied with the academic instruments of rational investigation? What kinds of religious illumination are experienced by academically minded people? And what is the specific nature of the knowledge of God that university theologians of the Middle Ages enjoyed compared with other modes of knowing God, such as rapture, prophecy, the beatific vision, or simple faith? Ecstasy in the Classroom explores the interface between academic theology and ecstatic experience in the first half of the thirteenth century, formative years in the history of the University of Paris, medieval Europe’s “fountain of knowledge.” It considers little-known texts by William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor, William of Auvergne, Alexander of Hales, and other theologians of this community, thus creating a group portrait of a scholarly discourse. It seeks to do three things. The first is to map and analyze the scholastic discourse about rapture and other modes of cognition in the first half of the thirteenth century. The second is to explicate the perception of the self that these modes imply: the possibility of transformation and the complex structure of the soul and its habits. The third is to read these discussions as a window on the predicaments of a newborn community of medieval professionals and thereby elucidate foundational tensions in the emergent academic culture and its social and cultural context. Juxtaposing scholastic questions with scenes of contemporary courtly romances and reading Aristotle’s Analytics alongside hagiographical anecdotes, Ecstasy in the Classroom challenges the often rigid historiographical boundaries between scholastic thought and its institutional and cultural context.



Listening to Ecstasy

Author : Charles Wininger

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 342 pages

File Size : 10,13 MB

Release : 2020-10-20

Category : Body, Mind & Spirit

ISBN : 1644111179

Get eBook

Book Description

A personal narrative and guide to the safe, responsible use of MDMA for personal healing and social transformation • Details the author’s 50 years of responsible experimentation with mind-altering substances and how Ecstasy has helped him become a better therapist • Explains how he and his wife found Ecstasy to be the key to renewing and enriching their lives and marriage as they entered their senior years • Describes what the experience actually feels like and provides protocols for the safe, responsible, recreational, and celebrational use of MDMA for individuals and groups In a world that keeps us separate from each other, MDMA is the chemical of connection. Aptly known in popular culture as “Ecstasy,” MDMA helps us rediscover our own true loving nature, often obscured by the traumas of life. On its way to becoming a prescription medication due to groundbreaking research on its use to treat PTSD, Ecstasy can offer benefits for all adult life stages, from 20-somethings to seniors. In this memoir and guide to safe use, Charles Wininger, a licensed psychoanalyst and mental health counselor, details the countless ways that Ecstasy has helped him become a better therapist and husband. He recounts his coming of age in the 1960s counterculture, his 50 years of responsible experimentation with mind-altering substances, and his immersion in the new psychedelic renaissance. He explains how he and his wife found Ecstasy to be the key to renewing and enriching their lives as they entered their senior years. It also strengthened the bonds of their marriage. Countering the fearful propaganda that surrounds this drug, Wininger describes what the experience actually feels like and explores the value of Ecstasy and similar substances for helping psychologically healthy individuals live a more “optimal” life. He provides protocols for the responsible, recreational, and celebrational use of MDMA, including how to perfect the experience, maximize the benefits and minimize the risks, and how it may not be for everyone. He reveals how MDMA has revitalized his marriage, both erotically and emotionally, and describes how pleasure, fun, and joy can be profound bonding and transformative experiences. Revealing MDMA’s versatility when it comes to bringing lasting renewal, pleasure, and inspiration to one’s life, Wininger shows that recognizing the transformative power of happiness-inducing experiences can be the first step on the path to healing.



Sensible Ecstasy

Author : Amy Hollywood

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 388 pages

File Size : 15,35 MB

Release : 2010-01-15

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0226349462

Get eBook

Book Description

Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.



Ecstasy Unveiled

Author : Larissa Ione

Publisher : Forever

Page : 260 pages

File Size : 14,75 MB

Release : 2010-02-01

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 044656396X

Get eBook

Book Description

A DEMON ENSLAVED Lore is a Seminus half-breed demon who has been forced to act as his dark master's assassin. Now to earn his freedom and save his sister's life, he must complete one last kill. Powerful and ruthless, he'll stop at nothing to carry out this deadly mission. AN ANGEL TEMPTED Idess is an earthbound angel with a wild side, sworn to protect the human Lore is targeting. She's determined to thwart her wickedly handsome adversary by any means necessary-even if that means risking her vow of eternal chastity. But what begins as a simple seduction soon turns into a passion that leaves both angel and demon craving complete surrender. Torn between duty and desire, Lore and Idess must join forces as they battle their attraction for each other. Because an enemy from the past is rising again-one hellbent on vengeance and unthinkable destruction.



Pursuit of Ecstasy

Author : Jerome Beck

Publisher : State University of New York Press

Page : 258 pages

File Size : 40,14 MB

Release : 1994-03-08

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0791496090

Get eBook

Book Description

The authors have produced the first "on the ground" study (not just clinical or chemical) of MDMA (3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), or "ecstasy" as it is frequently designated. A psychoactive substance related to both the amphetamines and mescaline, MDMA has become popular in recent years as one of the new "designer" drugs. First used in therapeutic treatment, its recreational or street use has increased in recent years. The authors track the efforts (with psychiatrists and researchers in opposition) of the DEA to ban the drug.



Realist Ecstasy

Author : Lindsay V. Reckson

Publisher : NYU Press

Page : 328 pages

File Size : 39,26 MB

Release : 2020-01-28

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1479868922

Get eBook

Book Description

Honorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theater Research Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment. Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism’s relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices—including literature, photography, audio recording, and early film—Lindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent forms of being beside. Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized gestures—especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy—to racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow America.



Ecstasy and Terror

Author : Daniel Mendelsohn

Publisher : New York Review of Books

Page : 385 pages

File Size : 48,40 MB

Release : 2019-10-08

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1681374099

Get eBook

Book Description

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.