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An enlightening look at the surprising connections between spirituality and progressive thought in the United States.

Religious liberalism in America is often associated with an ecumenical Protestant establishment. This book, however, draws attention to the broad diversity of liberal cultures that shapes America’s religious movements.

The essays gathered here push beyond familiar tropes and boundaries to interrogate religious liberalism’s dense cultural leanings by looking at spirituality in the arts, the politics and piety of religious cosmopolitanism, and the interaction between liberal religion and liberal secularism. Readers will find a kaleidoscopic view of many of the progressive strands of America’s religious past and present in this richly provocative volume.

Indiana University Press

Religion in North America

American Religious Liberalism

Diane Sasson

This biography of an unconventional woman in late 19th Century America is a study of the search for individual autonomy and spiritual growth.

Laura Holloway-Langford, a “rebel girl” from Tennessee, moved to New York City, where she supported her family as a journalist. She soon became famous as the author of Ladies of the White House, which secured her financial independence. Promoted to associate editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, she gave readings and lectures and became involved in progressive women’s causes, the temperance movement, and theosophy—even traveling to Europe to meet Madame Blavatsky, the movement’s leader, and writing for the theosophist newspaper The Word. In the early 1870s, she began a correspondence with Eldress Anna White of the Mount Lebanon, New York, Shaker community, with whom she shared belief in pacifism, feminism, vegetarianism, and cremation. Attracted by the simplicity of Shaker life, she eventually bought a farm from the Canaan Shakers, where she lived and continued to write until her death in 1930. In tracing the life of this spiritual seeker, Diane Sasson underscores the significant role played by cultural mediators like Holloway-Langford in bringing new religious ideas to the American public and contributing to a growing interest in eastern religions and alternative approaches to health and spirituality that would alter the cultural landscape of the nation.

“[A] richly detailed biography … that will deepen historical understandings of New Age movements in America. ” —American Studies

Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality

David Chidester

An “ambitious and courageous” examination of the Jonestown cult viewed through the lens of theology (Journal of the American Academy of Religion).

Re-issued in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicides at Jonestown, this revised edition of David Chidester’s groundbreaking book features a new prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world.

For Chidester, the murder-suicide of some 900 members of the Peoples Temple in Guyana recalls the American religious commitment to redemptive sacrifice, which for Jim Jones meant saving his followers from the evils of capitalist society. “Jonestown is ancient history, ” writes Chidester, but it does provide us with an opportunity “to reflect upon the strangeness of familiar … promises of redemption through sacrifice. ” His original conclusion that the Peoples Temple was a meaningful religious movement seems all the more prescient and astute today, when fundamentalism has raised the troubling spectre of violence and suicide all over the world.

Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, The Peoples Temple, and Jonestown