American gurus : from transcendentalism to new age religion /
"By the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon that once was inconceivable had become nearly commonplace in American society: the American public spiritual teacher who does not belong to, or at least, is not authorized by a major religious tradition. From Eckhart Tolle and Andrew Cohen to fig...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2014]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "By the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon that once was inconceivable had become nearly commonplace in American society: the American public spiritual teacher who does not belong to, or at least, is not authorized by a major religious tradition. From Eckhart Tolle and Andrew Cohen to figures like Gangaji and Adhyashanti, there are now countless such spiritual teachers—both male and female—that claim and teach variants of instant or immediate enlightenment. American Gurus tells the story of how this phenomenon of religious immediatism emerged, especially in American religion. This phenomenon has many precedents and a long history. From Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to the twentieth century, the Beat movement, the psychedelic revolution, Timothy Leary, the influence of Hindu gurus to the New Age movement, Versluis tells the enthralling saga of how contemporary American immediatism came into being. Versluis shows how the confluence of Asian religions and Western mysticism come together to produce the continuing and fascinating saga that culminates in the phenomenon of contemporary 'spontaneously enlightened' American gurus."-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780190201951 0190201959 9780199368143 0199368147 |