Unsettled minds
Subtitle: psychology and the American pursuit of spiritual assurance, 1830/1940
By: Christopher G. White.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 266
ISBN-13: 9780520256798
Subjects: Psychology, Religious -- United States; Psychology and religion -- United States; Christianity -- Psychology; Liberalism (Religion) -- United States; United States -- Religion -- History
Description: "This book examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American believers rejected older, often evangelical, theological traditions and turned to scientific psychologies to help them formulate new ideas about mind and spirit and new practices for spiritual growth. Christopher G. White looks in particular at how a group of liberal Protestants, including William James and G. Stanley Hall, turned away from traditional Christian orthodoxies and built a revised religious identity based on new psychological motifs and therapies. Whereas the conventional wisdom about these religious positions and abetted secularization. White points out that they did not minimize or obliterate belief but aided and reshaped it in unexpected ways. Unsettled Minds is the first book to explain the dramatic rise of new spiritualities of the mind, spiritualities that, but the early twentieth century, were turning eagerly to scientific and clinical psychological studies to reimagine religion and the problems of religious uncertainty."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Minds intensely unsettled; title: Fragments of truth; title: Nervous energies; title: Neuro-muscular Christians; title: "A multitude of superstitions and crudities"; title: Suggestive explanations.