The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.

Forty years ago, while paging through a book sent as an unexpected gift from a friend, Roger Welsch came across a curious reference to stones that were round, "like the sun and moon." According to Tatonka-ohitka, Brave Buffalo (Sioux), these stones were sacred. "I make my request of the stones and they are my intercessors," Brave Buffalo explained. Moments later, another friend appeared at Welsch's door bearing yet another unusual gift: a perfectly round white stone found on top of a mesa in Colorado. So began Welsch's lesson from stones, gifts that always presented themselves unexpectedly: during a walk, set aside in an antique store, and in the mail from complete strangers. The Reluctant Pilgrim shares a skeptic's spiritual journey from his Lutheran upbringing to the Native sensibilities of his adoptive families in both the Omaha and Pawnee tribes. Beginning with those round stones, increasing encounters during his life prompted Welsch to confront a new way of learning and teaching as he was drawn inexorably into another world. Confronting mainstream contemporary culture's tendency to dismiss the magical, mystical, and unexplained, Welsch shares his personal experiences and celebrates the fact that even in our scientific world, "Something Is Going On," just beyond our ken.

When Kathy Berry joins a TV news crew and paranormal investigators as the team's impartial observer an overnight stay in the Goldfield Hotel shatters her beliefs that the paranormal is evil or figments of the weak-minded. In the Goldfield, eerie activity confronts her on every floor, and as she hears, feels and sees spirits, she must face her years-long denial that she possesses a sensitive's gifts.

Signs Wonders, and the Kingdom of God is a book for anyone who believes in God's supernatural power but who doubts that we can experience that power personally. This new book presents a fascinating, biblical theology of the Kingdom of God. Williams describes how God works to establish his reign now and in eternity and how we can demonstrate and proclaim, as Jesus did, the supernatural power of his kingdom. Signs, Wonders, and the Kingdom of God investigates the relationship between supernatural power and the ministry of the church today. As a community of love and faith under the reign of God, we continue Jesus' ministry of power evangelizing the poor, casting out demons, healing the sick, and setting free the captives.

Everton Maraldi explores how research on alleged anomalous processes informs the study of religious/spiritual experiences and examines the theoretical and methodological possibilities and challenges of an interdisciplinary dialogue between parapsychology and psychology of religion.

Bill Johnson, Joyce Meyer, Heidi Baker. The fame of these names is evidence enough that, though the controversies are less intense, the Charismatic Movement is alive and well today. It continues to attract thousands of adherents who find its vision of a supernatural lifestyle uniquely compelling. Now, for the first time, all that is most theologically innovative about the movement is synthesized into five distinct and original ideas. These five brand new theologies have been created, not by theologians, but by practitioners who believed their concepts were inspired by the Spirit: Inner Healing, Shepherding, Word of Faith, Spiritual Warfare, and Signs and Wonders. Plenty of studies have been written by Pentecostal scholars about Pentecostal theology, but these tend to group the very distinct approaches of Charismatics together with Classical Pentecostals. Bold Faith aims to analyze and evaluate the ways in which practitioners within independent Charismatic networks, especially in their Anglo-American expressions, have responded to the challenges of secular modernity.

When Pope John Paul II died, Suzanne Strempek Shea, who had not been an active member of a church community for some years, recognized in his mourners a faith-filled passion that she longed to recapture in her own life. So she set out on a pilgrimage to visit a different church every Sunday for one year-a journey that would take her through the broad spectrum of contemporary Protestant Christianity practiced in this country. From a rousing Easter Baptist service in Harlem, to Colorado's Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame for a sing-along at the Cowboy Church; from a roofless Episcopal church in Hawaii, to a storefront African orthodox church where jazz legend John Coltrane is considered a bona fide saint; from the largest church in the country to a small-town church packed for a Sunday school class taught by Jimmy Carter, Shea toured more than thirty states in search of the meaning of Christian faith to the many who practice it. The result, Sundays in America, is an essential guide for those seeking a new house for their worship as well as a colorful road trip for the armchair explorer.

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. The Mathematical Imagination is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.