Volume Five of Clive Barker's seminal Books of Blood contains the stories: 'The Forbidden', 'The Madonna', 'Babel's Children', 'In the Flesh'. With the 1984 publication of Books of Blood, Clive Barker became an overnight literary sensation. He was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror", and won both the British and World Fantasy Awards. Now, with his numerous bestsellers, graphic novels, and hit movies like the Hellraiser, Clive Barker has become an industry unto himself. But it all started here, with this tour de force collection that rivals the dark masterpieces of Edgar Allan Poe. Read him and rediscover the true meaning of fear.
While working on a project translating letters from sixteenth-century Prague, high school senior Nora Kane discovers her best friend murdered with her boyfriend the apparent killer and is caught up in a dangerous web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all searching for a mysterious ancient device purported to allow direct communication with God.
For more than a thousand years, Buddhism has dominated Japanese death rituals and concepts of the afterlife. The nine essays in this volume, ranging chronologically from the tenth century to the present, bring to light both continuity and change in death practices over time. They also explore the interrelated issues of how Buddhist death rites have addressed individual concerns about the afterlife while also filling social and institutional needs and how Buddhist death-related practices have assimilated and refigured elements from other traditions, bringing together disparate, even conflicting, ideas about the dead, their postmortem fate, and what constitutes normative Buddhist practice. The idea that death, ritually managed, can mediate an escape from deluded rebirth is treated in the first two essays. Sarah Horton traces the development in Heian Japan (794–1185) of images depicting the Buddha Amida descending to welcome devotees at the moment of death, while Jacqueline Stone analyzes the crucial role of monks who attended the dying as religious guides. Even while stressing themes of impermanence and non-attachment, Buddhist death rites worked to encourage the maintenance of emotional bonds with the deceased and, in so doing, helped structure the social world of the living. This theme is explored in the next four essays. Brian Ruppert examines the roles of relic worship in strengthening family lineage and political power; Mark Blum investigates the controversial issue of religious suicide to rejoin one’s teacher in the Pure Land; and Hank Glassman analyzes how late medieval rites for women who died in pregnancy and childbirth both reflected and helped shape changing gender norms. The rise of standardized funerals in Japan’s early modern period forms the subject of the chapter by Duncan Williams, who shows how the Soto Zen sect took the lead in establishing itself in rural communities by incorporating local religious culture into its death rites. The final three chapters deal with contemporary funerary and mortuary practices and the controversies surrounding them. Mariko Walter uncovers a "deep structure" informing Japanese Buddhist funerals across sectarian lines—a structure whose meaning, she argues, persists despite competition from a thriving secular funeral industry. Stephen Covell examines debates over the practice of conferring posthumous Buddhist names on the deceased and the threat posed to traditional Buddhist temples by changing ideas about funerals and the afterlife. Finally, George Tanabe shows how contemporary Buddhist sectarian intellectuals attempt to resolve conflicts between normative doctrine and on-the-ground funerary practice, and concludes that human affection for the deceased will always win out over the demands of orthodoxy. Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism constitutes a major step toward understanding how Buddhism in Japan has forged and retained its hold on death-related thought and practice, providing one of the most detailed and comprehensive accounts of the topic to date. Contributors: Mark L. Blum, Stephen G. Covell, Hank Glassman, Sarah Johanna Horton, Brian O. Ruppert, Jacqueline I. Stone, George J. Tanabe, Jr., Mariko Namba Walter, Duncan Ryuken Williams.
Geller is Irma Cameron Milstein Professor of Bible at Jewish Theological Seminary. Geller's attention to language and interest in applying the methods of literary analysis to the Hebrew Bible are reflected in his work throughout his career. He has addressed such topics as "The Dynamics of Parallel Verse" in Deuteronomy 32, the "Language of Imagery in Psalm 114," and the literary uses of "Cleft Sentences with Pleonastic Pronoun." Combining a historical orientation with deep exegeses of individual texts, he has focused on the contribution that the literary approach might make to the study of biblical religion. He has developed what he terms a "literary theology," in which, by examining the literary devices in the passage under consideration, he has been able to formulate emerging religious ideas that the ancient writers did not express in systematic treatises. His method is illustrated in his studies of texts that represent the major religious traditions of the Hebrew Bible; these studies have been collected in Sacred Enigmas, published in 1997. The essays in this volume were contributed by colleagues, friends, and students of Stephen A. Geller to mark the occasion of his 65th birthday. Contributors include: Tzvi Abusch, Marc Z. Brettler, Alan Cooper, Frank Moore Cross, Stephen Garfinkel, Edward L. Greenstein, Robert A. Harris, S. Tamar Kamionkowski, Kathryn F. Kravitz, Anne Lapidus Lerner, David Marcus, Yochanan Muffs, Benjamin Ravid, Michael Rosenbaum, Raymond P. Scheindlin, William M. Schniedewind, Diane M. Sharon, Benjamin D. Sommer.
