New Books and Media

From the publisher's website: Reincarnation as a Scientific Concept focuses on the question of whether reincarnation should be recognized as a serious subject by the contemporary scientific community. After a historical overview of the psychical research into reincarnation memories, the authors present well-documented cases that have been studied by scholars from East and West.

Further information at the publisher's website: White Crow Books.

From the publisher's website: Building on the groundbreaking research of Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism, Edward Kelly and Paul Marshall gather a cohort of leading scholars to address the most recent advances in the psychology of consciousness. Currently emerging as a middle ground between warring fundamentalisms of religion andscience, an expanded science-based understanding of nature finally accommodates empirical realities of spiritual sorts while also rejecting rationally untenable overbeliefs.

The vision sketched here provides an antidote to the prevailing postmodern disenchantment of the world and demeaning of human possibilities. It not only more accurately and fully reflects our human condition but engenders hope and encourages ego-surpassing forms of human flourishing. It offers reasons for us to believe that freedom is real, that our human choices matter, and that we have barely scratched the surface of our human potentials. It also addresses the urgent need for a greater sense of worldwide community and interdependence - a sustainable ethos - by demonstrating that under the surface we and the world are much more extensively interconnected than previously recognized. 

Further information at the publisher's website: Rowman & Littlefield.

From the publisher's website: Within days of the widely-publicised disaster of 1912, stories began circulating of extraordinary omens and individuals who supposedly had supernatural premonitions of the disaster. Furthermore, four fictional works – one dating as far back as twenty-six years – came to be seen as anticipating the disaster.  

Between 1960 and 2006, five major commentators published extended analyses of the alleged premonitions, none of which is now easily accessible to an English readership. This book examines them all in detail. The whole treatment of the matter opens up fascinating questions concerning the paranormal, but also raises and leaves unresolved crucial issues specific to premonitions and how they can be legitimately examined. 

Readers are left to make their own judgement on Titanic premonitions.

Further information at the publisher's website: Matador. 

From the publisher's website: In the world of parapsychology and psychical research Erlendur Haraldsson may well be remembered as one of the great investigators, particularly in field research. In a career spanning more than six decades Haraldsson worked with past luminaries such as J. B. Rhine, one of the founders of parapsychology and Ian Stevenson, whose work with children claiming past life experiences, has spawned much of the today’s reincarnation research.Towards the Unknown chronicles Haraldsson’s work in India, the Middle East, the US and Europe and includes his studies of the Indian spiritual teacher Sathya Sai Baba, the Icelandic medium, Indridi Indridason, deathbed visions, past-life cases and a whole array of psychic phenomena.

Further information at the publisher's website: White Crow Books. 

From the publisher's website: Manifesting Spirits is an exploration of contemporary trance and physical mediumship at a private spiritualist home-circle called the Bristol Spirit Lodge. Located in a garden on the outskirts of Bristol, the Lodge is a wooden shed specially constructed for the purposes of mediumship development and spirit communication. Through a combination of ethnographic observations in séances – including his own experiences of mediumship development – and interviews with spirits and their mediums, Hunter delves into a sub-urban world of trance states, ectoplasm, spirit lights and discarnate entities. Issues relating to altered states of consciousness, personhood, performance and the efficacy of ritual are examined in order to make sense of the processes by which spirits become manifest in social reality.

Further information at the publisher's website: AEON Books.