A testimony with a difference is a book that will inspire a reader to know God can deliver no matter how great the problem.It will encourage christians to live closer to Jesus and deeper in their prayer life. It is written by a British born christain of a strong Jamaican background. You will have a taste of the real distresses follow young men of ethnic origin such as Michael. Michael share his testimoney on how God heal him when he was ill which leads him to have an encounter with God. A ...

In Literature for Little Bodhisattvas, Natasha Heller makes two key interventions: first, she argues that picturebooks are a new genre of Buddhist writing, and second, she calls attention to an emergent family Buddhism in Taiwan that fashions children as religious subjects through shared attention with adult readers.Surveying Taiwanese Buddhism from the ground up, Heller explores the changing family dynamics that have made children into a crucial audience for Buddhist educ...

Around the first century BCE, Buddhist monks formed monasteries and established relationships with kings and lay people. The rules monks live by, the Vinaya, are a pivotal source of meaning for them and their dealings with society and form the basis of multiple monasticisms across geographical regions and throughout history. The ways in which the Vinaya is understood and practiced, therefore, must take into account the kind of monasticism that emerges from it. In Living with the Vinaya...

The Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna, located in China’s southern Yunnan province, is the largest community of Theravada Buddhists in a country where the Mahayana tradition is dominant. In recent decades, and in light of ever-increasing global connectivity and visibility online, the public participation of Tai Lue novices and monks in practices such as eating in the afternoon, drinking alcohol, having girlfriends, and competing in sports—all considered unfitting, even unacceptable, behavior for Bu...

Southeast China is a traditional stronghold of Buddhism, but little scholarly attention has been paid to this fact. Brian Nichols’s pioneering book, Lotus Blossoms and Purple Clouds, centers on a large Buddhist monastery in Quanzhou and combines ethnographic detail with stimulating analysis to examine religion in post-Mao China. Nichols conducted more than twenty-six months of field research over a fourteen-year period (2005–2019) to develop a re-description of Chinese monastic Bu...

A young Polish/ American who grows up in New Jersey, becomes a soccer phenomenon from a young age of five. He excels in the sport and excels in languages and studies all the way through his high school year. His final game of the season a Italian scout from the Italian series A team Inter Milan, comes to watch him play at his high school to see what all the hype is about this superstar player. He is given the opportunity after graduation to fly to Milan and tryout for the team and the rest...

This innovative collaborative work—the first to focus on Buddhist tourism—explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic and cultural trends in the region.Following an introduction that offers the first theoret...

Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to villages, individual temple communities, or a single national community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these different framings: They are part of local communities, are governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the above—collectively and often simultaneous...

Monstrous Utopias examines how monsters in performance, theatre, media, and literature reflect and subvert societal understandings.This book considers the ethical and hopeful work of monsters and examines ways in which playwrights, theatre and performance artists, film artists, drag artists, dancers, cultural practitioners, and activists have engaged the monster to reflect the ongoing fears (including racist, sexist, homophobic, and others) of our society and how those mon...

Collecting together Fin del Mundo, Valley of the Heart, and Adíos Mamá Carlota, this book compiles the latest plays of Luis Valdez and explores how they stand to be considered masterpieces by the man who brought the world Zoot Suit and La Bamba.Luis Valdez has been described as the “last of the great American playwrights,” referring to a Golden Age of U.S. playwriting that began with Eugene O’Neill and included Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, ...

Staging Monstrous Bodies: Questioning Normative Orders brings together global perspectives from leading and emerging scholars to explore the intersections of monster studies and performances studies.Divided into three parts, the volume explores the connection between monstrosity and performance, such as representations of violence, gender and sexuality contexts, disability studies perspectives, anti-racism and post-colonial issues, and monstrosity as an artistic practice a...

The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond. This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of...