How do individuals inscribe their spiritual identities and diasporic ethnicities in the city? Through a series of sociological and photographic essays, Terence Heng maps the various rituals, collectives, individuals and events that characterise Chinese religion practices in Singapore. From spirit mediums to the Hungry Ghost Festival, each chapter engages with the social, the spatial and the ephemeral, and in so doing it will explore the significance and relevance of Chinese religion in a secular nation-state; reveal the strategies and tactics used by diasporic individuals to perform and retain their identities; uncover the importance of flow and fluidity in the making of sacred space; and evidence the value and efficacy of the use of photographs in social research. Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts is a ground-breaking exploration into the intersections between visual sociology, cultural geography and creative photographic practice. A visual monograph that gives equal importance to image and text, it interrogates the tensions between sacred and profane, official and unofficial, state and individual, physical and spiritual, peeling away the myriad layers of the spiritual imagination.

"Seeing Ghosts through God's Eyes" documents the explosive rise of interest in ghosts, and how this is affecting tens of millions of Americans concept of spirituality. Despite the fact that ghosts have become ensconced in our culture and contributed to the change in the spiritual landscape in the last few years, the church and media have taken a dismissive posture towards this issue. But the main focus of the book is to answer the question: do ghosts exist? Science,logic,and a biblical worldview are used to analyze this question-a unique methodology is employed which unearths evidence and issues never before discussed. Comprehensive and compelling new paranormal and scientific evidence that answers beyond a reasonable doubt the question of whether ghosts exist. The author proposes an empirically verifiable hypothesis which would PROVE his perspective on ghosts. Lastly, titanic issues are at stake in this debate.

THIS BOOK CONTAINS PRAYERS, INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOUSE BLESSINGS, AND A SECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS. INTENSE READING ABOUT REAL EXORCISMS AND EXTREME PARANORMAL CASES. Descended from a long line of Spiritual Warriors, Reverend Shawn P. Whittington shares his background, knowledge, and most chilling and life-changing moments. An ordained exorcist and deliverance minister, Shawn and his wife, Sharon (also a minister) have over 40 years of experience with ghosts and demons. They reside in Las Vegas, Nevada. NOTHING IS MORE FRIGHTENING THAN THE TRUTH. Table of Contents 1. Warriors for Christ 2. Catholicism and Spirituality 3. A Calling 4. Never Too Young 5. All Grown Up 6. Vegas Supernatural 7. Home Is Where The Heart Is 8. They Run In A Pack 9. Man With No Face 10. The Holy Spirit 11. Black Dogs And Beasts 12. Paranormal Ministry 13. The Final Chapter Part I and Part II - (Exorcism by Distance) 14. Prayers 15. Photo Gallery

Demon warrior puppets, sword-wielding Taoist priests, spirit mediums lacerating their bodies with spikes and blades—these are among the most dramatic images in Chinese religion. Usually linked to the propitiation of plague gods and the worship of popular military deities, such ritual practices have an obvious but previously unexamined kinship with the traditional Chinese martial arts. The long and durable history of martial arts iconography and ritual in Chinese religion suggests something far deeper than mere historical coincidence. Avron Boretz argues that martial arts gestures and movements are so deeply embedded in the ritual repertoire in part because they iconify masculine qualities of violence, aggressivity, and physical prowess, the implicit core of Chinese patriliny and patriarchy. At the same time, for actors and audience alike, martial arts gestures evoke the mythos of the jianghu, a shadowy, often violent realm of vagabonds, outlaws, and masters of martial and magic arts. Through the direct bodily practice of martial arts movement and creative rendering of jianghu narratives, martial ritual practitioners are able to identify and represent themselves, however briefly and incompletely, as men of prowess, a reward otherwise denied those confined to the lower limits of this deeply patriarchal society. Based on fieldwork in China and Taiwan spanning nearly two decades, Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters offers a thorough and original account of violent ritual and ritual violence in Chinese religion and society. Close-up, sensitive portrayals and the voices of ritual actors themselves—mostly working-class men, many of them members of sworn brotherhoods and gangs—convincingly link martial ritual practice to the lives and desires of men on the margins of Chinese society. This work is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese ritual and religion, the history and sociology of Chinese underworld, the history and anthropology of the martial arts, and the anthropology of masculinity.

Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.