Can doubt be a catalyst for growth?The Victorian era was the first great "Age of Doubt" and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world.In The Age of Doubt, distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed a...

How did Norman Vincent Peale's blockbuster bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking capture the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, reshaping the nation's spiritual landscape?The dramatic untold story of how Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States in the 1950s.Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, American minister Norman Vincent Peale publishe...

A mysterious ritual murder at a remote Alaskan oil rig brings an Inupiat Eskimo police detective back to the land of his People to catch a killer, and save his own hide.Police Detective Ray Attla, an Inupiat Eskimo, is spending a few days with his grandfather on the reservation when he's called into the icy Alaskan wilderness to investigate a death at an isolated oil rig. The killing has all the marks of a ritual murder, and Ray must confront the traditions of his People to catch a...

Inupiat police officer Ray Attla joins two of his police buddies for a three-day caribou hunt in the Alaskan Bush country. But when gear and supplies are lost, the trio fishes for food and pulls in the remains of a human head. Ray assumes the deceased fell victim to a tragic accident -- until he and the party are dodging bullets. Fleeing on foot to an archaeological dig, Ray suspects that unearthed artifacts are not the only remains to be uncovered. Coincidentally, or at the hands of the I...

Academy Award–winning director William Friedkin (b. 1935) is best known for his critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist. Unlike other film school–educated filmmakers of the directors’ era, Friedkin got his start as a mailroom clerk at a local TV station and worked his way up to becoming a full-blown Hollywood filmmaker by his thirties. His rapid rise behind the camera from television director to Oscar winner came with self-confi...

The practice of listening to subtle, inner sounds during meditation to concentrate and elevate the mind has a long history in various religions around the world, including Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Today there are a number of new religious movements that have made listening to the inner sound current a cornerstone of their teachings. These groups include the Radhasoamis, the Divine Light Mission, Eckankar, the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA...

To understand hatred and civility in today's world, argues Christopher Lane, we should start with Victorian fiction. Although the word "Victorian" generally brings to mind images of prudish sexuality and well-heeled snobbery, it has above all become synonymous with self-sacrifice, earnest devotion, and moral rectitude. Yet this idealized version of Victorian England is surprisingly scarce in the period's literature--and its journalism, sermons, poems, and plays--where villains, hypocrites,...

This thesis describes the development of a new technique to solve an important industrial inspection requirement for a high-value jet-engine component. The work – and the story told in the thesis – stretches all the way from the fundamentals of wave propagation in anisotropic material and ultrasonic array imaging through to device production and site trials. The book includes a description of a new method to determine crystallographic orientation from 2D ultrasonic array data. Another new ...

In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain’s empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire’s many layers of conflict and ambivalence.Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the w...

The concept of vocation in an early modern setting calls to mind the priesthood or religious life in a monastery or cloister; to be “called” by God meant to leave the concerns of the world behind. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, French Catholic clergy began to promote the innovative idea that everyone, even an ordinary layperson, was called to a vocation or “state of life” and that discerning this call correctly had implications for one’s happiness and salvation, and for the soci...

Modern-day Atlanta. Driven by his tragic past, prosecutor Chance Meridian seeks justice for a beautiful woman brutally murdered in her own home.Except nothing comes easy in Atlanta, and certainly not justice. A lot of people in town wanted Sara Barton dead, and every single one of them is lying about something. Chance shouldn't be surprised. Murder is an ugly business. But so is love.Masterful, fast-paced, and full of intrigue, The Murder of Sara Barton...