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.