Description: American spirituality--with its focus on individual meaning, experience, and exploration--is 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, Massachusetts--a 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 alike--and shape an enduring set of modern religious possibilities in the process.
Brief description: Courtney Bender is professor of religion at Columbia University and author of Heaven's Kitchen: Living with Religion at God's Love We Deliver, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Review Quotes:
"Truly distinctive and distinguished. Bender captures the subtlety of the religious voices, practices, and struggles of those she terms contemporary metaphysicals living amid shifting economic realities, modern assumptions about science and progress, and related entanglements. This is a remarkable book simply for recording these fascinating practitioners and helping readers understand their categories of practice and experience in all their complexity. But her work does far more than merely record; it offers a compelling examination of how we may think anew about these categories and the people--metaphysicals and scholars alike--for whom they matter. Hilarious and humane all at once: it's a rare mix, and Bender hits the mark again and again."
--R. Marie Griffith, Harvard Divinity School