University of California Press.
Spirituality is usually easier to recognize than to analyze.
Here, Robert Wuthnow, a distinguished student of religion who teaches sociology at Princeton University, attempts to get a handle on the upsurge in spirituality that, according to most measures, seems to have occurred in the United States in the last several decades. Both descriptive and prescriptive, After Heaven is the work of a man who is deeply committed at the same time to value-free sociological inquiry and to his own Christian faith. Wuthnow gazes with a mixture of admiration and perplexity at the idiosyncratic ways in which he sees spirituality cropping up in America today. Americans clearly find a need to connect with a force larger than the individual, henotes, while also wondering whether too many of us are taking the easy path by claiming to be spiritual without really working at it. Neither is intrinsically better than the other, he argues.