In this magisterial study, Norman J. Girardot focuses on James Legge (1815-1897), one of the most important nineteenth-century figures in the cultural exchange between China and the West. A translator-transformer of Chinese texts, Legge was a pioneering cross-cultural pilgrim within missionary circles in China and within the academic world of Oxford University. By tracing Legge's career and his close association with Max Muller (1823-1900), Girardot elegantly brings a biographically embodied approach to the intellectual history of two important aspects of the emergent "human sciences" at the...

Isabelle Robinet's Taoist Meditation is the first and only scholarly study to discuss the ancient Mao-shan Taoist tradition of visionary meditation while, at the same time, helping to clarify the little understood relationship among the early Taoist classics, the Buddhist tradition, and the later Taoist religion. Most importantly, Taoist Meditation is a pioneering study that fully and accurately describes the unique visionary cosmology, bodily symbolism, astral journeys, internal alchemy, meditational techniques, and ritual practices of the Mao-shan or Shang-chi'ing (Great Purity)...

The Reverend Howard Finster (19162001) was called the backwoods William Blake and the Andy Warhol of the South, and he is considered the godfather of contemporary American folk and visionary art. This book is the first interpretive analysis of the intertwined artistic and religious significance of Finster s work within the context of the American outsider art tradition. Finster began preaching as a teenager in the South in the 1930s. But it was not until he received a revelation from God at the age of sixty that he began to make sacred art.
A modern-day Noah who saw his art as a...