“Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe” Stephen C. Meyer

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "Beginning in the late 19th century, many intellectuals began to insist that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic belief—that science and belief in God are “at war.” Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer challenges this view by examining three scientific discoveries with decidedly theistic implications. Building on the case for the intelligent design of life that he developed in Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer demonstrates how discoveries in cosmology and physics coupled with those in biology help to establish the identity of the designing intelligence behind life and the universe. Meyer argues that theism — with its affirmation of a transcendent, intelligent and active creator — best explains the evidence we...>>

“Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny” by Isabella van Elferen

"Gothic Music traces the sound of the Gothic from the eerie echoing footsteps that haunt gothic novels to the dark soundscapes that give contemporary goth nightclubs their dark atmosphere. This broad perspective enables Isabella van Elferen to widen the scope of gothic music which includes bands such as Christian Death, Bauhaus, The Damned, and The Sisters of Mercy from its roots in the contemporary goth subculture to manifestations in mainstream literature, film, television, and video games, while also offering a musical and theoretical definition of gothic music that is lacking in current scholarship. Bringing together versions of the Gothic in all media, van Elferen connects those to the subculture a historical and theoretical connection...>>

“Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History” by Shawn Smallman

"In the traditional Algonquian world, the windigo is the spirit of selfishness, which can transform a person into a murderous cannibal. Native peoples over a vast stretch of North America—from Virginia in the south to Labrador in the north, from Nova Scotia in the east to Minnesota in the west—believed in the windigo, not only as a myth told in the darkness of winter, but also as a real danger. Drawing on oral narratives, fur traders' journals, trial records, missionary accounts, and anthropologists’ field notes, this book is a revealing glimpse into indigenous beliefs, cross-cultural communication, and embryonic colonial relationships. It also ponders the recent resurgence of the windigo in popular culture and its changing...>>

“Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World” by David Robert Grimes

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "Good Thinking is our best defense against anti-vaccine paranoia, climate denial, and other dire threats of today In our ever-more-polarized society, there’s at least one thing we still agree on: The world is overrun with misinformation, faulty logic, and the gullible followers who buy into it all. Of course, we’re not among them—are we? Scientist David Robert Grimes is on a mission to expose the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that drive our discourse on a dizzying array of topics–from vaccination to abortion, 9/11 conspiracy theories to dictatorial doublespeak, astrology to alternative medicine, and wrongful convictions to racism. But his purpose in Good Thinking isn’t to shame or place blame. Rather, it’s to interrogate our...>>

“Language and Myth” by Ernst Cassirer

"In this important study Ernst Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. He demonstrates that beneath both language and myth there lies an unconscious "grammar" of experience, whose categories and canons are not those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical "logic" is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, and that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous power over even our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry and myth. The author analyzes brilliantly such seemingly diverse (yet related) phenomena as the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, the Melanesian concept of Mana, the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, modern poetry, Ancient Egyptian religion, and symbolic...>>