As we approach the millennium, apocolyptic expectations are rising in North America and throughout the world. Outside the symbolic aura of the millennium, this excitation is fed by currents of unsettling social and cultural change. The millennial myth ingrained in American culture is continually generating new movements, which draw upon the myth and also reshape and reconstruct it. This text examines many types of apocolypticism such as economic, racialist, environmental, feminist, as well as those erupting from established churches. Many of these movements are volatile and potentially...

Scholars of apocalyptic and millennial groups explore various aspects of contemporary apocalyptic fervour including how such movements have gained ground in largely secular societal circles and the links between apocalypticism and established churches.

Examines the urgent and important issues facing new religions in their political, legal and religious contexts in global perspective. With essays from prominent new religious movement scholars, this book provides insight into the challenges facing religion in the 21st century.

Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. It also deals with the problem of redheads.

What if the Second Coming didn't quite come off as advertised? What if "the Corpse" on display in that funky roadside zoo is really who they say it is--what does that portend for the future f western civilization? And what if a young clairvoyant named Amanda reestablishes the flea circus as popular entertainment and fertility worship as the principal religious form of our high-tech age? Another Roadside Attraction answers those questions and a lot more. It tell us, for example, what the sixties were truly all about, not by reporting on the psychedelic decade but by recreating it, from...

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all "bursting with dimples and hormones"--and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.
Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins's classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic...

When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you--an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker--are convinced that you're facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses. Over these fateful three days, you will be forced to confront...

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations...

It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins Tom Robbins's gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative new novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils.

Skinny Legs and All deals, in Robbins's...

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior). Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters's strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering...

In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.

From the Paperback edition.