num_pages: 301
description: A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults practices high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.In Strange Rites Tara Isabella Burton takes a tour through contemporary American religiosity. As the once dominant totems of civic connection and civil discoursetraditional churchescontinue to sink into obsolescence people are looking elsewhere for the intensity and unity that religion once provided. We're making our own personal faiths - theistic or not - mixing and matching our spiritual ritualistic personal and political practices in order to create our own bespoke religious selves. We're not just building new religions in 2019 we're buying them from Gwyneth Paltrow's gospel of Goop to the brilliantly cultish SoulCycle to those who believe in their special destiny on Mars.In so doing we're carrying on a longstanding American tradition of religious eclecticism DIY-innovation and unchurched piety (and highly effective capitalism). Our era is not the dawn of American secularism but rather a brand-bolstered resurgence of American pluralism revved into overdrive by commerce and personalized algorithms all to the tune of Hallellujah--America's most popular and spectacularly misunderstood wedding song.
language: English
title: Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
publisher: PublicAffairs