Over the past few decades, Daoism has become a recognizable part of Western "alternative" spiritual life. Now, that Westernized version of Daoism is going full circle, traveling back from America and Europe to influence Daoism in China. Dream Trippers draws on more than a decade of ethnographic work with Daoist monks and Western seekers to trace the spread of Westernized Daoism in contemporary China. David A. Palmer and Elijah Siegler take us into the daily life of the monastic community atop the mountain of Huashan and explore its relationship to the socialist state. They follow the international circuit of Daoist "energy tourism," which connects a number of sites throughout China, and examine the controversies around Western scholars who become practitioners and promoters of Daoism. Throughout are lively portrayals of encounters among the book's various characters Chinese hermits and monks, Western seekers, and scholar-practitioners as they interact with each other in obtuse, often humorous, and yet sometimes enlightening and transformative ways. Dream Trippers untangles the anxieties, confusions, and ambiguities that arise as Chinese and American practitioners balance cosmological attunement and radical spiritual individualism in their search for authenticity in a globalized world.

Raising Arizona , Fargo , The Big Lebowski , No Country for Old Men , True Grit aJoel and Ethan Coen make movies. They make movies that matter. But do these movies matter for religion? Coen is a masterful response to this question of religious significance that neither imposes alien orthodoxy nor consigns the Coens to religious insignificance. The Coen movies discussed each receive a chapter-length investigation of the specific film's relation to the religious. Far more than just documenting religion in all Coen filmsafrom blink-and you'll-miss-them biblical references to gospel tunes framing the soundtrackathe volume, cumulatively, mounts a compelling case for the Coens' consistent religious outlook with an original argument about precisely what constitutes religion. The volume reveals how Coen films emerge as morality tales, set in a mythological American landscape, that critique greed and self-interest. Coen heroes often confront apocalyptic and unredeemable evil, face human limitation and the banality of violence, and force audiences to wrestle with redemption and grace within the stark moral worlds portrayed on screen. This is religion on Coen terms. Coen teaches its readers something new about religion, about film, and about the kind of world-making that each claims to be.

In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the social history and anthropology of Daoism from the late nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the evolution of traditional forms of practice and community, as well as modern reforms and reinventions both within China and on the global stage. Essays investigate ritual specialists, body cultivation and meditation traditions, monasticism, new religious movements, state-sponsored institutionalization, and transnational networks.