num_pages: 272
description: American spiritualitywith its focus on individual meaning experience and explorationis usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. But as The New Metaphysicals makes clear contemporary American spirituality has historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements. To explore this world Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge Massachusettsa key site of alternative religious inquiry from Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis Bender discovers that a focus on the new on progress and on the way spiritual beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners and those who study it alikeand shape an enduring set of modern religious possibilities in the process.
language: English
title: The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination
publisher: University of Chicago Press