The writers of Practising the Witch's Craft 'provide deep insights for newcomers and for experienced witches into what it means to be a contemporary witch and how witches practise their art and integrate their magic with everyday life.Vivianne Crowley, author of Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium and The Natural MagicianPractising the Witch's Craft tells the stories of ordinary people who have discovered that life is enchanted ...

Faunalia is a controversial Pagan festival with a reputation for being wild and emotionally intense. It lasts five days, 80 people attend, and the two main rituals run most of the night. In the tantalisingly erotic Baphomet rite, participants encounter a hermaphroditic deity, enter a state of trance and dance naked around a bonfire. In the Underworld rite participants role play their own death, confronting grief and suffering. These rituals are understood as "shadow work" - a Jungian term ...

Offering a detailed introduction to the practice of data analysis, this book is both user-friendly and theoretically grounded. Drawing on his extensive experience of qualitative research, Douglas Ezzy reviews approaches to data analysis in established research traditions including ethnography, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, alongside the newer approaches informed by cultural studies and feminism. He explains the difference between inductive, deductive and abductive theory build...

Drawing on the emerging field of narrative theory in sociology and psychology, this book argues that an individual’s response to job loss is a product of the shape of the story a person tells about their experience. This, in turn, is a product of both individual creativity and the structuring effects of their social location. Based on a qualitative study of the experience of unemployment in Australia, three main types of job loss narratives are identified. First, romantic narratives descri...

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Christians details the processes through which LGBT Christians resolve the fraught tensions between their religious, sexual and gendered identities, and examines the associated changes to their religious practice in the pursuit of “authenticity.” The book moves between richly described first-person accounts and clear theoretical analysis, contextualising the disucssion within contemporary theories of religion and same-sex attraction. Through ...

This book documents the structure of religious diversity in Australia and examines this diversity in the context of the law, migration, education, policing, the media and interfaith communities.Focusing on Melbourne and Tasmania, it articulates the benefits and opportunities of diversity, alongside the challenges that confront religious and ethnic minorities, including discrimination and structural inequalities generated by Christi...