This fascinating collection makes a powerful case for contemporary spirituality as a new religious movement. <i>The Shape of Spirituality</i> offers radical new analyses showing that it is real religion and that it has, almost unnoticed, become integral to schools and doctors’ offices, Silicon Valley technovisions, and civic and social-justice activism. Taking spirituality seriously, this volume shows, is essential for understanding religion’s significant current role in our collective life.
- Ann Swidler, coeditor of <i>Challenging Modernity</i>,
This collection demonstrates the growing public significance of holistic spiritualities, making a powerful case that the shift from religion to spirituality signals a profound reconfiguration as important as the one that is shaking the political sphere in this age of populism. Lifting the blinders that the secularization paradigm continues to pull over our understanding of the spiritual turn, this book reveals an epochal shift away from Christianity in the West.
- François Gauthier, author of <i>Religion, Modernity, Globalisation: Nation-State to Market</i>,
Challenging conventional accounts of secularization, Houtman and Watts assemble essays by many of the leading scholars of contemporary spirituality, showing that Western spirituality is far more coherent and influential than the received wisdom suggests.
- Philip Gorski, coauthor of <i>The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy</i>,
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Dick Houtman is professor of sociology of culture and religion at the Center for Sociological Research, University of Leuven. He is the author or editor of many books, most recently Science Under Siege: Contesting the Secular Religion of Scientism (2021).Galen Watts is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (2022).