Utilizing contemporary scholarship on secularization, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, and Jediism. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining wider audience through the 1980s and 1990s, is chiefly as a result of underground publishing and the internet. This book deals with immensely popular subject matter: Jediism developed from George Lucas' Star Wars films; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by 26-year-old student Bobby Henderson in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius which retain strong followings and participation rates among college students. The Church of All Worlds' focus on Gaia theology and environmental issues makes it a popular focus of attention. The continued success of these groups of Invented Religions provide a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late/post-modern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity-formation, and personal orientation.

Since the early 1990s there have been various waves of interest in what is often described as masculine spirituality. While diverse, a commonality among these interests has been a concern that spirituality has become too feminine, and that mens experiences of the spiritual are being marginalized. Masculine spirituality is therefore about promoting what it perceives to be authentic masculine characteristics within a spiritual context. By examining the nature of these characteristics, Numen, Old Men argues that masculine spirituality is little more than a thinly veiled patriarchal spirituality. The mythopoetic, evangelical, and to a lesser extent Catholic mens movements all promote a heteropatriarchal spirituality by appealing to neo-Jungian archetypes of a combative and oppressive nature, or understanding mens role as biblically ordained leader of the family. Numen, Old Men then examines Ken Wilbers integral spirituality which aims to honour and transcend both the masculine and feminine, but which privileges the former to the extent where it becomes another masculine spirituality, with all its inherent patriarchal problems. Gay spirituality is then offered as a form of masculine spirituality which to a large degree resists patriarchal tendencies, suggesting a queering of spirituality could be useful for all men, both gay and straight.

Goddess as Nature makes a significant contribution to elucidating the meaning of a female and feminist deity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Bridging the gap between the emergent religious discourse of thealogy - discourse about the Goddess - and a range of analytical concerns in the philosophy of religion, the author argues that thealogy is not as incoherent as many of its critics claim. By developing a close reading of the reality-claims embedded within a range of thealogical texts, one can discern an ecological and pantheistic concept of deity and reality that is metaphysically novel and in need of constructive philosophical, thealogical and scholarly engagement. Philosophical thealogy is, in an age concerned with re-conceiving nature in terms of agency, chaos, complexity, ecological networks and organicism, both an active possibility and a remarkably valuable academic, feminist and religious endeavour.

It is widely acknowledged that the United States has al- ways provided fertile ground for the growth of new religious movements and cults, but modern organized efforts to oppose and restrict them have been less well understood. In Agents of Discord, Anson Shupe and Susan E. Darnell offer a groundbreaking analysis of the operations and motives of these oppositional groups, which they generally group under the umbrella term of the anticult movement.

Historically there have always been parallel groups opposed to certain religious movements, whether these be anti-Quaker, anti-Roman Catholic, or anti-Mormon. The authors establish the cultural context of such movements in the nineteenth century. They point out the link between modern anticult movements and nativist movements in American history. Turning to the postwar era, the authors discuss the rise of anticult movements and focus specifically on one of the most prominent, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). CAN was a two-tiered organization. Partly composed of volunteers, donors, and families affected by cult movements, it also included what the authors call an "inner sanctum" of behavioral science professionals, attorneys, and deprogrammers. Using never-before-reported data on CAN's activities, the authors cite an extensive history of financial impropriety that finally led to the organization's bankruptcy. They offer a pointed critique, informed by current scholarship, of the "brainwashing" model of mental enslavement presented by the anticult movement that has been a central assumption undergirding its activities. At the same time, they show how increasing professionalization has gradually begun a shift of such movements to a therapeutic model of exit counseling that rejects the crude methods of earlier intervention strategies.

In their analysis of the anticult movement nationally and internationally, Shupe and Darnell merge sociological concepts and social history to make unique sense of a heretofore relatively unexplored phenomenon.

What happens on the other side of life?

Author Bruce Moen continues to bring us evidence that physical death is just a momentary event in our eternal consciousness as he explores life after death in this, the third book in his Exploring the Afterlife series.

Using groundbreaking techniques developed by Robert A. Monroeaauthor of the classic Journeys out of the Body and founder of The Monroe InstituteaMoen projects himself out of his body to travel beyond death into new realms of existence. His travels allow him to access knowledge available only to out-of-body explorers. With Moen, you will journey to the center of the Earth, develop a unique understanding of how astrology really works, and even make contact with extraterrestrials.

But more fascinatingaand empoweringais his glimpse of the community of souls, his explorations of nonphysical environments, and his growing understanding of what he has witnessed. Read Voyages in the Afterlife: Charting Unknown Territory and learn, along with Bruce Moen, the nature of the cosmos and our place in it.

Shows how some of the ideas about the afterlife presented by spiritualism helped to shape popular Christianity in the period. From the moment of its arrival in Britain in 1852, modern spiritualism became hugely popular among all sections of society. As well as offering mysterious and entertaining seance phenomena, spiritualism was underpinned by a beliefthat the living could communicate with the departed and even come to know what life after death looked like. This book, offering the first detailed account of the theology of spiritualism, examines what happened when the Church of England, itself already grappling with questions about the nature of the afterlife, met with such a vibrant and confident presentation. Although this period saw a gradual liberalising in the Church's own theology of heavenand hell this was not communicated to the wider public as long as sermons and liturgy remained largely framed in traditional language. Over time spiritualism, already embedded in common culture, explicitly influenced the thinkingof some Anglican clergy and implicitly began to permeate and shape popular Christianity - to the extent that even some of spiritualism's harshest critics made use of its colourful imagery. This study sets one significant aspect ofChristian doctrine alongside an attractive alternative and provides a fascinating example of the 'negotiation of belief', the way in which, in the interface between Church and culture, religious belief came to be refreshed and redefined. GEORGINA BYRNE is an ordained Anglican priest and currently Director of Ordinands for the Diocese of Worcester and a Residentiary Canon at Worcester Cathedral.

Have you been touched by the Mystery? You may not remember it but we have all been touched in some mysterious way by the divine. Though we know that traumatic memories are often suppressed, the fact that we all, particularly as children, are likely to have had significant spiritual experiences of great goodness and importance to us is generally rejected, its remembrance discouraged. But these experiences remain within us, ready to re-awaken, when the right catalyst enters our lives. Walking with the Ineffable is a memoir of one woman's walk through the mystery of spiritual experiences. It is about the changing weather of belief: what we believe, why we believe, and when we believe. Steeped in the mysticism of Christian, Sufic, and other spiritual transmissions and pilgrimages, the author, aided by a vibrant company of a host of wise-eyed, mischievous cats, brings a broad spiritual perspective to the perennial quest of the human soul to know itself and its Maker, and to the discovery of that hidden splendor, waiting to shine, in the depths of us all.

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.

2018 Edgar Award Finalist—Best Fact Crime “A thoroughly readable, thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey” (The Boston Globe)—the definitive story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre, the largest murder-suicide in American history, by the New York Times bestselling author of Manson. In the 1950s, a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially mixed, and he was a leader in the early civil rights movement. Eventually, Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to northern California, where he got involved in electoral politics and became a prominent Bay Area leader. But underneath the surface lurked a terrible darkness. In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his early days as an idealistic minister to a secret life of extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing, before the fateful decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink. Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is “the most complete picture to date of this tragic saga, and of the man who engineered it…The result is a disturbing portrait of evil—and a compassionate memorial to those taken in by Jones’s malign charisma” (San Francisco Chronicle).

By the end of the first decade of the Victorian era political, religious and social ideas were in a state of flux, and profound, far-reaching cultural changes were taking shape. The spirit of enquiry generated by this upheaval produced both a striking advance in philosophical materialism, and an equally pronounced quest for evidence of a life after death - evidence that would supply proof of the reality of a spiritual world. This quest gave birth to the multi-faceted movement of Spiritualism. Growing out of a complex combination of religious enthusiasm, Mesmerism, and the influence of the New England Transcendentalists, Spiritualism as a movement first appeared in 1848. Its proponents offered what they claimed was verifiable evidence of the reality of the spirit world, and of their ability to communicate with individual, identifiable spirits. Spiritualism was taken up with enthusiasm by all sections of society; institutions to investigate and to promote the new movement were established; its history and pre-history were mapped out, evidence was gathered, sifted and debated; and the theological and philosophical implications were analyzed in depth. In one way or another, Spiritualis