Built into a huge cliff in central France, the town of Rocamadour is a visual marvel and a place of contradictions. Pilgrims come to venerate its ancient Black Madonna but are outnumbered by secular tourists. Weibel provides an intimate look at the transformation of Rocamadour from a significant religious center to a tourist attraction; the efforts by clergy to restore Rocamadour’s spiritual character; the supernatural reinterpretations of the shrine by non-Catholics; and the desperate decision by the Diocese to participate in tourism itself, with disastrous results. For more information, check out A Conversation with Deana L. Weibel: A Sacred Vertigo: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Rocamadour, France or this podcast episode on Meaningful Journeys. Deana L. Weibel appears on The Camino Podcast to discuss A Sacred Vertigo: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Rocamadour, France. Watch here.

Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called “sciences of the mind” reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling—which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall—has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti’s stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock’s most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock’s brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of “pushing away and bringing closer” which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my “here” flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger’s “being-toward-death,” Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.

Here, told in a vivid and original way, is the full story of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. This story has been told many times before, but Fr. Larranaga tells it with a new spirit, seamlessly combining a modern spirit with the freshness and sense of wonder of the Fioretti. When Francis Bernardone was held as a prisoner of war at the age of 20, he never dreamed that he would become a knight in the service of Lady Poverty. By the time he died 25 years later, he had become the Poor Man of God, the living image of the Crucified Savior.

Cultural and spiritual bonds with ‘nature’ are among the strongest motivators for nature conservation; yet they are seldom taken into account in the governance and management of protected and conserved areas. The starting point of this book is that to be sustainable, effective, and equitable, approaches to the management and governance of these areas need to engage with people’s deeply held cultural, spiritual, personal, and community values, alongside inspiring action to conserve biological, geological, and cultural diversity. Since protected area management and governance have traditionally been based on scientific research, a combination of science and spirituality can engage and empower a variety of stakeholders from different cultural and religious backgrounds. As evidenced in this volume, stakeholders range from indigenous peoples and local communities to those following mainstream religions and those representing the wider public. The authors argue that the scope of protected area management and governance needs to be extended to acknowledge the rights, responsibilities, obligations, and aspirations of stakeholder groups and to recognise the cultural and spiritual significance that ‘nature’ holds for people. The book also has direct practical applications. These follow the IUCN Best Practice Guidelines for protected and conserved area managers and present a wide range of case studies from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.

In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noël Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, Sacred Realism views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.

"Never again!" In the years following the Holocaust, the phrase came to signify a general determination never again to permit systemic anti-Semitism and genocidal violence. Yet anti-Semitism endures, and its underlying causes persist. The resilience of anti-Semitism casts the Holocaust not as inexplicable or singular, but as an event shaped by identifiable--and universal--human prejudices. Despite the intense attention focused on the Holocaust, we consistently misrepresent it. By describing it as a purely irrational phenomenon, we risk minimizing the threat that anti-Semitism continues to pose. Instead, we must identify and acknowledge its causes, which are not only political, economic, and pseudoscientific but ideological as well. Taking its title from the Book of Esther, Mordecai Would Not Bow Down investigates these ideological causes. Timothy P. Jackson argues that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were persecuted for their belief in one God who is the sole Creator of a moral order centered in selflessness and love. Judaic teachings about the importance of caring for the weak and vulnerable overtly contradicted the Nazis' "natural" lust for power and enjoyment of cruelty, which further fueled their anti-Semitism. By analyzing the ideological clash between Nazism and Judaism, Jackson reveals the ways in which Christianity was complicit in the Holocaust-specifically, the role of Christian supersessionism: the belief that the New Covenant supplants or erases the Old Covenant, making Christians and not Jews God's elect. Supersessionism has historically enabled Christian anti-Semitic violence. Yet Judaism and Christianity are ultimately complementary in their shared origins and analogous aims: the Law that saves the Jews and the Gospel that saves the Gentiles are of a piece. God's choosing the Jewish people to embody collectively a message of fellowship and moral responsibility is parallel to God's calling on Jesus to save humanity individually. Moreover, both divine vocations often engender demonic resentment. Recognizing that Auschwitz and Calvary are but two sites of the same murderous despair is an important step toward eliminating the pervasive menace of anti-Semitism.

The inspiration for this book arose out of a large international conference: the ninth World Environmental Education Congress (WEEC) organized under the theme of Culture/Environment. Similarly, the theme for this book focuses on the Culture/Environment nexus. The book is divided into two parts: Part 1 consists of a series of research studies from an eclectic selection of researchers from all corners of the globe. Part 2 consists of a series of case studies of practice selected from a wide diversity of K-Postsecondary educators. The intent behind these selections is to augment and highlight the diversity of both cultural method and cultural voice in our descriptions of environmental education practice. The chapters focus on a multi-disciplinary view of Environmental Education with a developing view that Culture and Environment may be inseparable and arise from and within each other. Cultural change is also a necessary condition, and a requirement, to rebuild and reinvent our relationship with nature and to live more sustainably. The chapters address the spirit of supporting our praxis, and are therefore directed towards both an educator and researcher audience. Each chapter describes original research or curriculum development work.

A collection of newly translated writings by the French sociologist and surrealist.