This book investigates the psychological toll of conflict in the Middle East during the twentieth century, including discussion of how spiritual and religious frameworks influence practice and theory. The concept of mental health treatment in war-torn Middle Eastern nations is painfully understudied. In Disturbing Spirits, Beverly A. Tsacoyianis blends social, cultural, and medical history research methods with approaches in disability and trauma studies to demonstrate that the history of mental illness in Syria and Lebanon since the 1890s is embedded in disparate—but not necessarily mutually exclusive—ideas about legitimate healing. Tsacoyianis examines the encounters between “Western” psychiatry and local practices and argues that the attempt to implement “modern” cosmopolitan biomedicine for the last 120 years has largely failed—in part because of political instability and political traumas and in part because of narrow definitions of modern medicine that excluded spirituality and locally meaningful cultural practices. Analyzing hospital records, ethnographic data, oral history research, historical fiction, and journalistic nonfiction, Tsacoyianis claims that psychiatrists presented mental health treatment to Syrians and Lebanese not only as a way to control or cure mental illness but also as a modernizing worldview to combat popular ideas about jinn-based origins of mental illness and to encourage acceptance of psychiatry. Treatment devoid of spiritual therapies ultimately delegitimized psychiatry among lower classes. Tsacoyianis maintains that tensions between psychiatrists and vernacular healers developed as political transformations devastated collective and individual psyches and disrupted social order. Scholars working on healing in the modern Middle East have largely studied either psychiatric or non-biomedical healing, but rarely their connections to each other or to politics. In this groundbreaking work, Tsacoyianis connects the discussion of global responsibility to scholarly debates about human suffering and the moral call to caregiving. Disturbing Spirits will interest students and scholars of the history of medicine and public health, Middle Eastern studies, and postcolonial literature.

New York Times best-selling author Jentezen Franklin is back with a message that will inspire you to break free and reclaim a life of passion, purpose, and praise.

The Christmas spirit is overtaking Tradd Street with a vengeance in this festive new novel in the New York Times bestselling series by Karen White. Melanie Trenholm should be anticipating Christmas with nothing but joy—after all, it’s only the second Christmas she and her husband, Jack, will celebrate with their twin toddlers. But the ongoing excavation of the centuries-old cistern in the garden of her historic Tradd Street home has been a huge millstone, both financially and aesthetically. Local students are thrilled by the possibility of unearthing more Colonial-era artifacts at the cistern, but Melanie is concerned by the ghosts connected to it that have suddenly invaded her life and her house—and at least one of them is definitely not filled with holiday cheer.... And these relics aren’t the only precious artifacts for which people are searching. A past adversary is convinced there is a long-lost Revolutionary War treasure buried somewhere on the property Melanie inherited—untold riches rumored to have been brought over from France by the Marquis de Lafayette himself and intended to help the Colonial war effort. It’s a treasure literally fit for a king, and there have been whispers throughout history that many have already killed—and died—for it. And now someone will stop at nothing to possess it—even if it means destroying everything Melanie and Jack hold dear.

"A demon hellbent on chaos and pain throws a young man across a room again and again, without mercy or remorse, attempting to break his spirit and mutilate his soul. The evil spirits at the site of an old sanitarium destroy an innocent family, driving them into an unfathomable hole of addiction and madness. Ghostly shrieks of pain drive a researcher to the point of insanity, pushing her toward the infinite blackness of total annihilation."--Publisher.

Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history. In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds. The House of the Spirits not only brings another nation’s history thrillingly to life, but also makes its people’s joys and anguishes wholly our own.

Jack is not a normal boy. He can talk to ghosts. In his new home, an aging farmhouse, he meets the Ghost Mother, a grief-stricken spirit who becomes very attached to him...too attached. He learns that the Ghost Mother is preying in the cruelest imaginable way on four child ghosts who are trapped in the house, stealing their energy to sustain her own. Before Jack can figure out how to help them, the Ghost Mother takes possession of his real mother’s body. Jack wants to fight back, but he has severe asthma and risks fatal attacks with any physical exertion. It will take all his resources, and his mother’s as well, to fight off the Ghost Mother and save the ghost children from a horrible fate.

WITH A BRAND NEW LOOK! ON FEBRUARY 22, 1980, KHORSHED AND RUMI BHAVNAGRI’S WORLD WAS SHATTERED. ONE MONTH LATER, A NEW ONE OPENED. Khorshed and Rumi Bhavnagri lost their sons, Vispi and Ratoo, in a tragic car crash. With both their sons gone, the couple felt they would not survive for long. They had lost all faith in God until a miraculous message from the Spirit World gave them hope and sent them on an incredible journey.

Elementary Concepts of Spiritism is no substitute for the main works of the Spiritist Codification. It’s a quick and simple guide for those curious to learn Spiritist fundamentals: God, the immortality of the soul, Spirit communication, mediumship, the plurality of worlds and Jesus. It includes a succinct account of the story of Spiritism, a Q & A chapter, and a collection of maxims conveying the main points contained in the Spiritist Codification. So, for those of you out there wondering: what on earth is Spiritism? This book’s for you.