Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA window onto how spirituality has functioned as a social category that bestows value on even 'secular' objects, What Matters? brilliantly demystifies spirituality without banishing spirits. With an embarrassment of riches at hand, including paranormal shadows in 'real' science, turns to 'tribalism' in psytrance festivals, and 'spiritual' motivations within secular humanitarianism, these essays are an original foray into how spirituality is used to account for contemporary human experience, with piety and irony in play. -- Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto, author of Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity ...a helpful classroom resource. -- Ryan Harper Sociology of Religion
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Things of Value From a Materialist Ethic to the Spirit of Prehistory Conquering Religious Contagions and Crowds: Nineteenth-Century Psychologists and the Unfinished Subjugation of Superstition and Irrationality Religious and Secular, "Spiritual" and "Physical" in Ghana Volunteer Experience Secular Humanitarianism and the Value of Life Homeschooling the Enchanted Child: Ambivalent Attachments in the Domestic Southwest Mind Matters: Esalen's Sursem Group and the Ethnography of Consciousness Tribalism, Experience, and Remixology in Global Psytrance Culture Acknowledgments Contributors Index
