Home › Books › Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
by
8/99
Critics' Rating Index
40/99
Readers' Rating Index
95/99
Scholars' Citation Index
34/99
Volume of Reviews
52/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age. In Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton takes a tour through contemporary American religiosity. As the once dominant totems of civic connection and civil discourse—traditional churches—continue to sink into obsolescence, people are looking elsewhere for the intensity and unity that religion once provided. We're making our own personal faiths - theistic or not - mixing and matching our spiritual, ritualistic, personal, and political practices in order to create our own bespoke religious selves. We're not just building new religions in 2019, we're buying them, from Gwyneth Paltrow's gospel of Goop, to the brilliantly cultish SoulCycle, to those who believe in their special destiny on Mars. In so doing, we're carrying on a longstanding American tradition of religious eclecticism, DIY-innovation and "unchurched" piety (and highly effective capitalism). Our era is not the dawn of American secularism, but rather a brand-bolstered resurgence of American pluralism, revved into overdrive by commerce and personalized algorithms, all to the tune of "Hallellujah"--America's most popular and spectacularly misunderstood wedding song.
Reviews
"Burton writes fluently, doesn't take herself too seriously as an authority, and keeps her own political and metaphysical views mostly to herself."
"Nonetheless, this is a revelatory survey of the increasingly transfigured American spiritual landscape."
"The proliferation of 'mindfulness' courses being offered throughout companies from the C-suite to the cubicles suggests that they just might: evidence of a spreading credulousness, rather than greed ..."
"In fact, it is when the author leaves the traditional sects and the old-line outliers that the book really takes off ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!