Veins of Devotion details recent collaborations between guru-led devotional movements and public health campaigns to encourage voluntary blood donation in northern India. Focusing primarily on Delhi, Jacob Copeman carefully situates the practice within the context of religious gift-giving, sacrifice, caste, kinship, and nationalism. The book analyzes the operations of several high-profile religious orders that organize large-scale public blood-giving events and argues that blood donation has become a site not only of frenetic competition between different devotional movements, but also of intense spiritual creativity.
Veins of Devotion details recent collaborations between guru-led devotional movements and public health campaigns to encourage voluntary blood donation in northern India. Focusing primarily on Delhi, Jacob Copeman carefully situates the practice within the context of religious gift-giving, sacrifice, caste, kinship, and nationalism. The book analyzes the operations of several high-profile religious orders that organize large-scale public blood-giving events and argues that blood donation has become a site not only of frenetic competition between different devotional movements, but also of intense spiritual creativity.
In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, Hematologies broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the authors offer new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a "bloodscape of difference": different sovereignties; different proportionalities; and different temporalities. These entryways allow the authors to explore the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.
A Lost Wife A Found Messiah A World on the Brink of Damnation The Devil's minion has offered Crilen a deal: Return to a dead planet's past, save it from self-destruction, and be reunited with the loving wife who died in his arms over a decade ago. Not an impossible task for the fiery cosmic warrior who has built his life around rescuing planets from pagan religions, false gods and atheist monarchs. However, upon his arrival in the past, Crilen finds an incredibly complex world. A world tangled in a web of socio-political strife which threatens to sever the souls of its inhabitants from their faith in God and herd them into the burning pit of eternal suffering. Crilen's affections also become fixated upon Panla Jen, a devoutly religious leader, who seeks to reform her planet's faith by destroying the secular institution which has imprisoned the Word of God with ungodly man-made laws, rituals and ideals. An immoral government which enables the vices of the majority, an amoral news and entertainment media lusting for optimum profits and a violent underground atheist insurrection conspire to shepherd the masses into a spiritual death-spiral fueled by their own lusts for freedom as an end rather than a means. What must Crilen sacrifice to rescue this world and elude the Devil's bidding?
Layla With her family whole once more, Layla yearns for a break from the battles so she can spend time with her coven, but danger pursues her around every turn, stalking her with new and terrifying magic. She doesn’t know how to fight it, and she has more on the line than ever before. Quin Despite the stress and sleepless nights, having a family with Layla is Quin’s dream come true, and he’d do anything to extend their time at home. But even though loving an angel is easy, avoiding her perilous fate is impossible. The Enemy While the Dark Guild embarks on a ruthless campaign to replace their slain soldiers, they’ve hired Vortigern — the vile master of the world’s most powerful mind meddlers— to hunt down the earth angel and destroy her. Spurred by the promise of unimaginable wealth and power, Vortigern will stop at nothing to get the job done. witch, wizard, magic, battle, fight, flying, angels, demon, demons, deities, heaven, aura, love, lovers, soulmates, foreplay, sexual tension, kiss, coffee, emotional, new adult fantasy, paranormal romance, romantic, female protagonist, strong beautiful heroine, sexy sweet muscular handsome hero, family, life, death, revenge, survival, good vs evil, epic conflict, heartbreak, tearjerker, forest, beach, ocean, america, oregon, europe, oklahoma, international, psychic, psychics, twilight, witcher, epic fantasy, fantasy romance, strong female, strong female protagonist, Stephanie Meyer, Outlander, Blood & violence, Action & adventure, Angel/Demon lovers, Dual PoV, Emotional, Explicit Sexual Content, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Fate, Fated, Guardian, ward, Insta-love, Love at first sight, Magic, Magical sex, Mutual pining, NSFW, Part of a series that will have a happy ending, Passionate lovers, Protectiveness/protector, Reunion, Romantic sex, Sex, Sexual tension, She saves him, Stalker, Steamy, Supernatural elements, Swoon romance, Tear jerker, Third person pov, Ugly cry
Completed in 1173, The Book of Divine Works (Liber Divinorum Operum) is the culmination of the Visionary’s Doctor’s theological project, offered here for the first time in a complete and scholarly English translation. The first part explores the intricate physical and spiritual relationships between the cosmos and the human person, with the famous image of the universal Man standing astride the cosmic spheres. The second part examines the rewards for virtue and the punishments for vice, mapped onto a geography of purgatory, hellmouth, and the road to the heavenly city. At the end of each Hildegard writes extensive commentaries on the Prologue to John’s Gospel (Part 1) and the first chapter of Genesis (Part 2)—the only premodern woman to have done so. Finally, the third part tells the history of salvation, imagined as the City of God standing next to the mountain of God’s foreknowledge, with Divine Love reigning over all.
