American Religion

With eloquent simplicity, one of the world's last Native American medicine men demonstrates how traditional tribal wisdom can help us maintain spiritual and physical health in today's world.

Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other televangelists first spoke of the United States being a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedoms and our way of life.

Fire from Within is the author's most brilliant thought-provoking and unusual book, one in which Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan and his "disciples," at last constructs, from the teachings of don Juan and his own experiences, a stunning portrait of the "sorcerer's world" that is crystal-clear and dizzying in its implications.

Carlos Castaneda takes the listener into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is “natural” and “logical”. His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer’s knowledge - the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain.

Carlos Castanada was a student of anthropology when he met Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui shaman and the inspiration for Castanada’s The Teachings of Don Juan. In this controversial work, Castanada relays his experiences being challenged by his mentor on his perception of the world and all living things in it.

For us to perceive any of the worlds that exist beside our own, not only do we have to covet them but we need to have sufficient energy to seize them. In this revolutionary book, Carlos Castaneda offers listeners the key to this energetic conditioning for the first time, revealing a series of body positions and physical movements that enabled various sorcerers to navigate their own sorceric journeys. By sharing this wisdom, Carlos Castaneda makes it possible for listeners to travel to some of these other realms, which are as real, unique, absolute, and engulfing as our own world.

Bigfoot, the chupacabra, and thunderbirds aren't just figments of our overactive imaginations - according to thousands of eyewitnesses, they exist, in every corner of the United States. Throughout America's history, shocked onlookers have seen unbelievable creatures of every stripe - from sea serpents to apelike beings, giant bats to monkeymen - in every region.

Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas.

With the rise of Trumpism, the American evangelical movement has more political influence than ever—yet at the same time, people are leaving Christianity in record numbers. Why are so many people walking away from the right-wing religion they were raised in, and what are they doing to overcome the past? Writer and podcaster Blake Chastain is uniquely positioned to understand this phenomenon. Raised evangelical, he went to a Christian college intending to become a pastor—until he found himself unable to reconcile his faith with the prejudice and even abuse he saw being done in God’s name.

In American Gospel (literally meaning the "good news about America"), New York Times best-selling author Jon Meacham sets the record straight on the history of religion in American public life. As Meacham shows, faith, meaning a belief in a higher power, and the sense that we are God's chosen, has always been at the heart of our national experience, from Jamestown to the Constitutional Convention to the Civil Rights Movement to September 11th.

The smoke clears. The world watches. A name is announced. A man steps forward and the earth’s gaze falls upon him. We have a Pope! And his name is Leo XIV. But who is this 266th successor to St. Peter? What is the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost’s vision for the Church, and what impact will his papacy have on Catholics and on the world? Veteran Catholic journalist and historian Matthew Bunson offers the first authoritative portrait of the new Holy Father.

In this landmark work of emerging African American womanist theology, Delores Williams finds in the biblical figure of Hagar-mother of Ishmael, cast into the desert by Abraham and Sarah, but protected by God - a prototype for the struggle of African-American women. African slave, homeless exile, surrogate mother, Hagar's story provides an image of survival and defiance appropriate to black women today.

With The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda chronicled a journey toward enlightenment under the tutelage of Yaqui Indian guru Don Juan. Having sold more than eight million copies of his books around the world, Castaneda has inspired countless readers with his awareness-expanding experiences.

What is human consciousness, and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture.

In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing. The four writers were Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.

There is a natural law-a spiritual intelligence that we are all born with that lies within our hearts.

The riveting true story of America’s first homegrown Muslim terror attack, the 1977 Hanafi siege of Washington, DC.

Acts is Volume 26 from Gospel & Acts, the New Testament, from the Unabridged Contemporary English Version Translation of the Holy Bible.

Four years after his father died a hero's death fighting a fire, Tim Ginocchetti was behind bars for killing his mother. How one tragedy led to another is a true story that puts a horrifying twist on the familiar one of bullied gay teens. In this case, the bully was the teen's own mother, and instead of harming himself he killed her in a momentary but irreversible explosion of rage.

First published in 1985, Habits of the Heart continues to be one of the most discussed interpretations of modern American society, a quest for a democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditions. In a new preface, the authors relate the arguments of the book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition, one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.