In Circuits of the Sacred Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Latinx Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit. Decena models what he calls a faggotology—the erotic in the divine as found in the disreputable and the excessive—as foundational to queer black critical and expressive praxis of the future. Drawing on theoretical analysis, memoir, creative writing, and ethnography of Santería/Lucumí in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Decena moves between languages, locations, pronouns, and genres to map the itineraries of blackness as a “circuit,” a multipronged and multisensorial field. A feminist pilgrimage and extended conversation with the dead, Decena’s study is a provocative work that transforms the academic monograph into a gathering of stories, theoretical innovation, and expressive praxis to channel voices, ancestors, deities, theorists, artists, and spirits from the vantage point of radical feminism and queer-of-color thinking.

We now include in the back of this edition, an Audio DVD of the entire content of the Urantia Book, at NO additional cost.

Written in the form of a revelation from divine beings, the classic guide to expanding consciousness presents texts discussing God, the universe, angels and other beings, the history of the world, the development of civilization, personal spiritual growth, and the life and teachings of Jesus.

Too often, observers of globalization take for granted that the common ground across cultures is a thin layer of consumerism and perhaps human rights. If so, then anything deeper and more traditional would be placebound, and probably destined for the dustbin of history. But must this be so? Must we assume--as both liberals and traditionalists now tend to do--that one cannot be a cosmopolitan and take traditions seriously at the same time? This book offers a radically different argument about how traditions and global citizenship can meet, and suggests some important lessons for the contours of globalization in our own time. Adam K. Webb argues that if we look back before modernity, we find a very different line of thinking about what it means to take the whole world as one’s horizon. Digging into some fascinating currents of thought and practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, across all major civilizations, Webb is able to reveal patterns of "deep cosmopolitanism", with its logic quite unlike that of liberal globalization today. In their more cosmopolitan moments, everyone from clerics to pilgrims to empire-builders was inclined to look for deep ethical parallels—points of contact—among civilizations and traditions. Once modernity swept aside the old civilizations, however, that promise was largely forgotten. We now have an impoverished view of what it means to embrace a tradition and even what kinds of conversations across traditions are possible. In part two, Webb draws out the lessons of deep cosmopolitanism for our own time. If revived, it has something to say about everything from the rise of new non-Western powers like China and India and what they offer the world, to religious tolerance, to global civil society, to cross-border migration. Deep Cosmopolis traces an alternative strand of cosmopolitan thinking that cuts across centuries and civilizations. It advances a new perspective on world history, and a distinctive vision of globalization for this century which has the real potential to resonate with us all.

Erotic Cartographies uses maps drawn by Trinidadian same-sex-loving women to demonstrate how their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging, and challenge colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.

Explores key issues in biocultural diversity, examining species and sites considered to be sacred and their implications for conservation.

The Sathya Sai global civil religious movement incorporates Hindu and Muslim practices, Buddhist, Christian, and Zoroastrian influences, and "New Age"-style rituals and beliefs. Shri Sathya Sai Baba, its charismatic and controversial leader, attracts several million adherents from various national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. In a dynamic account of the Sathya Sai movement's explosive growth, Winged Faith argues for a rethinking of globalization and the politics of identity in a religiously plural world. This study considers a new kind of cosmopolitanism located in an alternate understanding of difference and contestation. It considers how acts of "sacred spectating" and illusion, "moral stakeholding" and the problems of community are debated and experienced. A thrilling study of a transcultural and transurban phenomenon that questions narratives of self and being, circuits of sacred mobility, and the politics of affect, Winged Faith suggests new methods for discussing religion in a globalizing world and introduces readers to an easily critiqued yet not fully understood community.