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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
They Flew: A History of the Impossible

They Flew: A History of the Impossible

Audio Book

General ChristianityGeneral World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798874684556
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: Feb 13 2024
Language: English
Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era--tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft--even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos Eire explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals.

Eire observes how levitating saints and flying witches were as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and as much a part of history as Newton's scientific discoveries. Relying on an array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases involving levitation, bilocation, witchcraft, and demonic possession, Eire challenges established assumptions about the redrawing of boundaries between the natural and supernatural that marked the transition to modernity.

Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns, Eire challenges listeners to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the supernatural's relationship with the natural world. The questions he explores have resonance and lessons for our time.

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Eire, Carlos M. N.

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General World History