Introducing two Stringfellow/Towne reprints about Bishop Pike: The Bishop Pike Affair The Death and Life of Bishop Pike The Death and Life of Bishop Pike is an in-depth, documented portrait of James A. Pike--the most controversial American clergyman of modern times. Based on prodigious research into private letters and unpublished documents, as well as exhaustive interviews, it is a biography so candid that the book itself is bound to be controversial. The authors are utterly frank about the bishop's turbulent personal life--his three marriages, his sexuality, his alcoholism, the suicides of his oldest son and of an intimate associate, the temptation of his celebrity, his complex relationship with his mother, and his terrible death in the wilderness. They have thoroughly investigated his notorious experiences with "psychic phenomena"--arriving at their own startling and provocative conclusions. Nevertheless, this book is neither an expose nor an apologia. It is an honest, dramatic, and compelling testament to an extraordinary and vital personality--to the colorful and courageous Christian witness of Bishop James A. Pike, whose advocacy of social justice and whose search for faith--restless and unorthodox as it was--had an astonishing impact on the contemporary church.

James A. Pike, the fifth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California, was a man of many faces. To some he was an iconoclast, a man decades ahead of his time who modernized the Church and rendered it more progressive and open to inquiry. To others he was a heretic, who polarized and desecrated the Church. Always controversial and charismatic, he took America by storm in the 1960s with his best-selling books, and his weekly television talk show, Dean Pike, which won him a cover story in Time. A Passionate Pilgrim is an illuminating biography of Pike, and an examination of the tragedies, triumphs, and difficulties that shaped his spectacular rise to fame and his mysterious death in the Israeli desert.

Introducing new reprints by and about Bishop James Pike: The Other Side Search The Other Side is a moving narrative of a father's efforts to save his son from enslavement to psychedelic drugs, a tragic story of a young and gifted man's premature death, a startling story of poltergeist occurrences that led the father and other witnesses to believe that from beyond the grave his son was trying to get in touch, a detailed account of how this communication proceeded during a time when the father was under accusation for heresy for believing too little. Above all, it is an analysis by one of America's keenest minds of what all these experiences may mean. The Other Side certainly reads like a suspenseful novel, yet every phrase of the narration is painstakingly documented by eyewitness accounts of the strange occurrences that led the Bishop Pike to consult mediums in England and America, and by several word-for-word tape recordings of such seances. All readers will find here an honest and lucid exploration of psychic phenomena, and those who have lost a loved one to suicide will find reason to take heart and find hope.

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.

"A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn't a legend and he wasn't mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."-Jonathan Lethem Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick's brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick's life and work.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the final novel in the trilogy that also includes Valis and The Divine Invasion, is an anguished, learned, and very moving investigation of the paradoxes of belief. It is the story of Timothy Archer, an urbane Episcopal bishop haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress--and driven by them into a bizarre quest for the identity of Christ. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Falling under the spell of an enigmatic extreme-sports surfer, a thrill-seeking pair of western Australian adolescents is initiated into a world of high-stakes adventures and dangerous boundary testing.