This edited volume explores the intersection of spirituality with childbirth from 1800 to the present day from a comparative perspective. It illustrates how over this time period in much of the world, traditional practices, home births, and midwives have been overshadowed and undermined by male dominated obstetrics, hospitalization, and ultimately the medicalization of the birthing process itself.

Sacred Pregnancy is a retrospective on evolving feminist discourse of motherhood, a sociological study of religious demographics and experience in the U.S., and an exploration of the spiritually guided reproductive health services. The book allows readers to more deeply understand the life-changing experiences of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.

In this detailed study, Russia's rural Muslim religious institutions in the Volga-Ural region and the Kazakh steppe, during the imperial period, are examined. It is based on the Turkic manuscript history Tavarikh-i Alti Ata.

This book is a poetic reading of the dialogical philosophy of martin buber. my reading of martin buber takes me to this principal insight: god is not in heaven nor on earth. god is not above nor below. not within and not without. not in the soul or in the flesh. god is not an entity anywhere: god is the between of an i and a thou. these pages are not an academic study in the strict sense. my meditations in this book are not a literal description of buber’s philosophy, for buber would never have approved of taking his words in any way other than in dialogue. buber wrote in-dialogue with the reader, and i read buber in the poetic philosophy of his words. in other words: we can say that the essential thinking in martin buber’s philosophy is that the presence of god in us is always enacted as the presence of god between us. god, like love, like poetry, is a deed we do. the god-deed is actualized not in rituals or temples, but in the practices of the sacraments of the neighbor. for there is nothing we can predicate of god, but we can still meet god in the embrace of the neighbor. we meet god as we meet with one another in genuine relationship. god is not in the relationship, god is the relationship. god is no-thing, but there is nothing that isn't god in the between of an i and a thou.

The image of the nurse is ubiquitous, both in life and in popular media. One of the earliest instances of nursing and media intersecting is the Edison phonographic recording of Florence Nightingale's voice in 1890. Since then, a parade of nurses, good, bad or otherwise, has appeared on both cinema and television screens. How do we interpret the many different types of nurses--real and fictional, lifelike and distorted, sexual and forbidding--who are so visible in the public consciousness? This book is a comprehensive collection of unique insights from scholars across the Western world. Essays explore a diversity of nursing types that traverse popular characterizations of nurses from various time periods. The shifting roles of nurses are explored across media, including picture postcards, film, television, journalism and the collection and preservation of uniforms and memorabilia.

Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. This book explores how imagery is used in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during the contemporary rituals of birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture.

This book is an in-depth conversation between philosophies of Dialogue, particularly as espoused by Martin Buber, and teachings from the wisdom traditions of the East, particularly Zen Buddhism and its Pure Land School. It argues that God is the between of I and Thou. Writings from Sufism, Hasidism, Hinduism and other spiritual traditions are excerpted as well, as they all draw their teachings from similar primordial moments of deep poetic insight. Dialogical philosophy articulates the principle of relationship, which is discussed throughout the book in its various contexts and different modalities.