This book tells the incredible story of the cross-correspondence automatic writings, described by one leading scholar of the field, Alan Gauld, 'as undoubtedly the most extensive, the most complex ...and the most puzzling of all ostensible attempts by deceased persons to manifest purpose, and in so doing to fulfil their overriding purpose of proving their survival'. It is an intensely personal and passionate story on so many levels: May Lyttelton trying to convince her lover Arthur Balfour of her continued existence; Myers with indomitable persistence trying to produce evidence to prove survival generally; Gurney and Francis Balfour striving from beyond the grave to influence the birth of children who would work for world peace; Gerald Balfour and his lover Winifred Coombe-Tennant believing that their child, Henry, would be the Messianic leader of this group of children.
Moral fire Horowitz, Joseph
2012., 20120422, 2012, 2012-05-22
eBook
Joseph Horowitz writes in Moral Fire: "If the Met's screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs (in the 1890s) are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly ...specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy." Arguing that the past can prove instructive and inspirational, Horowitz revisits four astonishing personalities—Henry Higginson, Laura Langford, Henry Krehbiel and Charles Ives—whose missionary work in the realm of culture signaled a belief in the fundamental decency of civilized human nature, in the universality of moral values, and in progress toward a kingdom of peace and love.
This biography of an unconventional woman in late 19th-century America is a study of a search for individual autonomy and spiritual growth. Laura Holloway-Langford, a "rebel girl" from Tennessee, ...moved to New York City, where she supported her family as a journalist. She soon became famous as the author of Ladies of the White House, which secured her financial independence. Promoted to associate editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, she gave readings and lectures and became involved in progressive women's causes, the temperance movement, and theosophy-even traveling to Europe to meet Madame Blavatsky, the movement's leader, and writing for the theosophist newspaper The Word. In the early 1870s, she began a correspondence with Eldress Anna White of the Mount Lebanon, New York, Shaker community, with whom she shared belief in pacifism, feminism, vegetarianism, and cremation. Attracted by the simplicity of Shaker life, she eventually bought a farm from the Canaan Shakers, where she lived and continued to write until her death in 1930. In tracing the life of this spiritual seeker, Diane Sasson underscores the significant role played by cultural mediators like Holloway-Langford in bringing new religious ideas to the American public and contributing to a growing interest in eastern religions and alternative approaches to health and spirituality that would alter the cultural landscape of the nation.
The impact of the Home Rule Crisis, the mass electorate created by the reforms of 1884 to 1885, the attributes of political performance, the entry of new plutocracies into national politics, the ...decline of aristocratic engagement in political life, the expansion of the popular press, the exposure of the behavior of elites to mass curiosity, and the nature of celebrity and scandal are brought to bear on the individual choices and fortunes of her subjects. Of this group of friends, only Balfour, who became Prime Minister in 1902 and remained active in politics until 1929, and Margot Tennant, as the wife of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, attained real prominence in national public life. ...there are times when Ellenberger's susceptibility to psychological jargon or inference reaches beyond the evidence.
On November 2nd 1917 Arthur Balfour, then Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Rothschild to say that the British Government viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the ...Jewish people. It was a statement the consequences of which have reverberated throughout the world in a crescendo of bitterness and violence ever since. It interposed a European (mainly Russian) Jewish cultural idea in an Arab land and it led eventually to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Eleven years before his declaration, Balfour had met the passionate Zionist and émigré chemist Chaim Weizmann while electioneering in Manchester. It was shortly after Uganda had been mooted as a possible homeland for the displaced Jews. Weizmann tried to explain his reasons for insisting on Jerusalem as the home of Zion. 'Suppose' he said, 'I were to offer you Paris instead of London?'. 'But, Dr Weizmann, we already have London,' Balfour replied. 'That is true, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.' Balfour was visibly surprised. 'Are there many Jews who think like you?' he asked. 'I believe I speak for millions of Jews,' replied Weizmann. 'It is curious' Balfour remarked, 'The Jews I meet are quite different.' 'Mr Balfour' said Weizmann, ' You meet the wrong kind of Jews.' At the centre of Geoffrey Lewis's compelling book is the story of this encounter and the developing relationship between these two men: the Zionist and the Zealot, so different from each other, yet drawn together by forces that neither quite understood, with consequences that were to have a profound effect on the modern world.
PDF