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Religion in the contemporary west is undergoing rapid change. In Predicting Religion twenty experts in the study of religion present their predictions about the future of religion in the 21st century - predictions based on careful analysis of the contemporary religious scene from traditional forms of Christianity to new spiritualities. The range of predictions is broad. A number predict further secularization - with religion in the west seen as being in a state of terminal decline. Others question this approach and suggest that we are witnessing not decline but transformation understood in different ways: a shift from theism to pantheism, from outer to inner authority, from God to self-as-god, and above all from religion to spirituality. This accessible book on the contemporary religious scene offers students and scholars of the sociology of religion and theology, as well as interested general readers, fresh insights into the future of religion and spirituality in the west. Published in association with the British Sociological Association Study of Religion group, in the Ashgate Religion and Theology in Interdisciplinary Perspective series.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that during the last century, most especially during and since the 1960s, the language of spirituality has become one of the most significant ways in which the sacred has come to be understood and judged in the West, and, increasingly, elsewhere. Whether it is true that 'spirituality' has eclipsed 'religion' in Western settings remains debatable. What is incontestable is that the language of spirituality, together with practices (most noticeably spiritual, complementary, and alternative medicine), has become a major feature of the sacred dimensions of contemporary modernity. Equally incontestably, spirituality is a growing force in all those developing countries where its presence is increasingly felt among the cosmopolitan elite, and where spiritual forms of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine are thriving. This new four-volume Major Work collection from Routledge provides a coherent compilation of landmark texts which cannot be ignored by those intent on making sense of what is happening to the sacred as spirituality-more exactly what is taken to be spirituality-develops as an increasingly important lingua franca, series of practices, and as a humanistic ethicality.
The New Age Movement represents one of the most facinating
responses to the the defects and potentialities of modern times. In
his ground-breaking work, Paul Heelas traces the growth and
development of the Movement, identifies some of its key
characteristics, and provides a critical perspective. This unique
and extensively documented volume provides a balanced treatment of
New Age 'celebration of the self', and situates it within the
broader cultural context for the first time. It shows how the New
Age is ambivalently related to modernity, offering both a radical
spiritual alternative to the mainstream and a celebration of some
of the characteristics features of modern life. Heelas thus iews
the New Age both as an alternative counter cultural movement and as
a spirituality of our times. The volume, with it clarity of form and its critique of conventional opinion, serves as an excellent starting point and mature contribution to the study of contemporary spirituality. This will be a core text for courses on the Sociolofy of Religion, and should be of enormous interest to all those concerned with the study of culture and the utopian; anthropologists of modernity; historians of oppositional movements; theology students and clergy; and the New Age activists alike.
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