Books about Profane from Amazon.com

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Los Angeles Police Detective Peter Decker had grown very close to Rina's young sons, Sammy and Jake, as he had to their mother, and he looked forward to spending a day of his vacation camping with the boys. A nice reprieve from the grueling work of a homicide cop-until Sammy stumbles upon a gruesome sight...

Two human skeletons, charred beyond recognition, are identified by a forensic dentist as teenage girls--and for Decker, the father of a sixteen-year-old daughter, vacation time is over. Throwing himself professionally and emotionally into the murder case, he launches a very personal investigation: a quest that pulls him deep into the crack dens of Hollywood Boulevard and painfully close to the children of the streets and a nightmare world he must make his own..
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Before Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492, no European had ever seen, much less tasted, tobacco or chocolate Initially dismissed as dry leaves and an odd Indian drink, these two commodities came to conquer Europe on a scale unsurpassed by any other American resource or product. A fascinating story of contact, exploration, and exchange in the Atlantic world, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures traces the ways in which these two goods of the Americas both changed and were changed by Europe.

Focusing on the Spanish Empire, Marcy Norton investigates how tobacco and chocolate became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike. Botanical ambassadors of the American continent, they also profoundly affected Europe. Tobacco, once condemned as proof of Indian diabolism, became the constant companion of clergymen and the single largest source of state revenue in Spain. Before coffee or tea became popular in Europe, chocolate was the drink that energized the fatigued and uplifted the depressed. However, no one could quite forget the pagan past of tobacco and chocolate, despite their apparent Europeanization: physicians relied on Mesoamerican medical systems for their understanding of tobacco; theologians looked to Aztec precedent to decide whether chocolate drinking violated Lenten fasts. The struggle of scientists, theologians, and aficionados alike to reconcile notions of European superiority with the fact of American influence shaped key modern developments ranging from natural history to secularization. Norton considers the material, social, and cultural interaction between Europe and the Americas with historical depth and insight that goes beyond the portrayal of Columbian exchange simply as a matter of exploitation, infection, and conquest..
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From the revelations of classical statuary pulled from the Roman soil as the popes began rebuilding the city in the fifteenth century, to the myth of serenity that Venice constructed to conceal its physical and political fragility, to bloody yet cultured Florence under the Medici, Ingrid Rowland traces the worldly, unworldly, and otherworldly strivings of artists, writers, popes, and politicians during that great "outburst of mental energy" we know as the Renaissance.

Here are Botticelli, whose illustrations for the Divine Comedy reveal him to be one of Dante's most careful readers; the multifaceted genius of Leonardo; the astonishing mastery of Titian and the erratic brilliance of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi; the enigmatic erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; the Western fascination with the mysteries of Egypt; and the glittering spiritual ferment of late Byzantium, which as it collapsed passed on so many ideas to Renaissance Italy.

But beyond its artistic accomplishments, Rowland writes, "Renaissance life at its most distinctive was the intangible, unworldly life of the mind." In her pages astronomers and astrologists, poets and philosophers, pornographers and prostitutes jostle for attention with painters and sculptors. Among them the inquisitive Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher stands out as a polymath who ranged over nearly every field of knowledge. Even though his commingling of scientific observation and hermetic symbolism is now obsolete, he remains for Rowland "a builder of connections who insisted on seeing harmony in the midst of disorder"—and thus one of the most exemplary Renaissance figures of all..
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Gerardus van der Leeuw was one of the first to attempt a rapprochement between theology and the arts, and his influence continues to be felt in what is now a burgeoning field. Sacred and Profane is the fullest expression of his pursuit of a theological aesthetics, surveying religion's relationship to all the arts -- dance, drama, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. This edition makes this seminal work, first published in Dutch in 1932, newly available. A new foreword by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona analyzes the continuing relevance of van der Leeuw's thought.
Van der Leeuw's impassioned and brilliant investigation of the relationship between the holy and the beautiful is founded upon the conviction that for too long the religious have failed to seriously contemplate the beautiful, associating it as they do with the kingdom of sensuality and impermanence. Similarly it has been alien to literati and aesthetes to reflect upon the holy, for they choose to consider this physical world to be permanent, and therefore to be glorified through beauty alone. In truth, as van der Leeuw undertakes to show in Sacred and Profane Beauty, the holy has never been absent from the arts, and the arts have never been unresponsive to the holy. Whether one considers the Homeric epics, the dancing Sivas and Vedic poems, the sacred wall paintings of ancient Egypt, the primitive mask, or the range of sacred arts developed out of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, primordial creation in the arts was always directed toward the symbolization and interpretation of the holy. The fact that in our day this original connection is obscured and the artistic impulse is more generally regarded as wholly individualistic and autonomous does not contradict van der Leeuw's thesis; indeed, the breakdown of the unity of the holy and the arts is central to his thesis.
Van der Leeuw was the rare thinker who combined profundity of insight, grace of style, and a willingness to take daring intellectual chances. In Sacred and Profane, he describes each of the arts in its original unity with the religious and then analyzes its historical disjunction and alienation. After a penetrating investigation of the structural elements within the arts which illumines a crucial dimension of the religious experience, van der Leeuw points toward the reemergence of an appropriate theological aesthetics on which a reunification of the arts could be founded..
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In this prizewinning book, Dell Upton interweaves architectural and cultural history to create a vivid new picture of colonial Virginia. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings, the book examines the architecture, decoration, and furniture of Virginia`s Anglican churches as expressions of eighteenth-century life and society..
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The murder mysteries that make up this unusual anthology all have one thing in common: the hero or heroine who solves the crime is a Catholic cleric. Perhaps that should not be surprising, for since the time of G. K. Chesterton those who have explored stories with a religious belief or background have tended to place them in the Middle Ages. And during that time most Christians were in one way or another connected to the Catholic church. From Chesterton’s classic priest-turned-detective Father Brown to Peter Tremayne’s historical Celtic nun and lawyer, Sister Fidelma, religious men and women put aside their professional duties for a moment to take up an altogether different vocation for a short time—that of detective and solver of crimes unspeakable. The stories in this collection of Catholic clerical sleuthing includes:

"Whispers of the Dead" by Peter Tremayne • "Bless Me Father, For I Have Sinned" by Ed Gorman • "Death by Fire" by Anne Perry and Malachi Saxon • "The Arrow of Ice" by Edward D. Hoch • "The Rag and Bone Man" by Lillian Stewart Carl • "Divine Justice" by Charles Meyer • "Cemetery of the Innocents" by Stephen Dentinger • "Veronica’s Veil" by Monica Quill • "Lowly Death" by Margaret Frazer • "Ex Libris" by Kate Gallison • "A Clerical Error" by Michael Jecks • "Through a Glass, Darkly" by Kate Charles • "The Knight’s Confession" by P. C. Doherty • "The Shorn Lamb" by Ralph McInerny.
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Lovejoy's search for a missing painting and a missing friend--Gesso the cat burglar--takes him on a wild adventure to the Channel Islands. He hopes to keep a low profile by masquerading as Jonno Rant, an island local, but that plan backfires when the local police start to keep tabs on him and the real Jonno Rant shows up. Can Lovejoy stay one step ahead of Rant and the police? Soon, just staying alive becomes a juggling act for the irrepressible Lovejoy.

"A welcome return of one of the most unusual characters in mysteryland."-- Publishers Weekly (starred review).
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