American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality PDF Download

Author: Catherine Tumber
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847697496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Based largely on research in popular journals, self-help manuals, newspaper accounts, and archival collections, American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality demonstrates that the New Age movement first flourished more than a century ago during the Gilded Age under the mantle of 'New Thought'. Tumber pays close attention to the ways in which feminism became grafted, with varying degrees of success, to emergent forms of liberal culture in the late nineteenth century, and questions the value of the new age movement--then and now--to the pursuit of women's rights and democratic renewal. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Author: Karlyn Crowley
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438436270
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Women's Issues Category Crystals, Reiki, Tarot, Goddess worship—why do these New Age tokens and practices capture the imagination of so many women? How has New Age culture become even more appealing than feminism? And are the two mutually exclusive? By examining New Age practices from macrobiotics to goddess worship to Native rituals, Feminism's New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism seeks to answer these questions by examining white women's participation in this hugely popular spiritual movement. While most feminist approaches to the New Age phenomenon have simply dismissed its adherents for their politically problematic racial appropriation practices, Karyln Crowley looks honestly at the political shortcomings of New Age beliefs and practices while simultaneously reckoning with the affective, political, and cultural motivations which have prompted New Age women's individual and collective spiritualities. New Age spirituality is in fact the dynamic outgrowth of a long-standing tradition of women's social and political power expressed through religious writings, art, and public discourse, and is key to understanding contemporary women's history and religion's role in modern American culture alike. Crowley offers a new and provocative assessment of the significance of the New Age movement, seen through a feminist and critical race studies lens.

Author: Charlene Spretnak
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 9780385172417
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 590

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Book Description
Essays discuss goddess worship, spiritual consciousness, the relationship between politics and religion, and applications of spirituality as a political force

Author: Cynthia Eller
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807065075
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A fascinating introduction to one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the United States today. Through interviews, participant-observation, and analysis of movement literature, Cynthia Eller explores what women who worship the goddess believe; how they express those beliefs in private, in public, and in the political realm; and the place of feminist spirituality in the history of American religion.

Author: Ellen Cole
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317764455
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This enlightening book examines how the feminist spirituality movement contributes to the establishment of new paradigms of mental health for women. Women’s Spirituality, Women’s Lives examines possible psychotherapeutic implications for women engaged in feminist spirituality and stimulates much-needed conversation between feminist therapists and feminist theologians/ritualists. Feminist spirituality is part of the current broad challenge to accepted ways of knowing and being. This book argues that as women tell their own stories, they create rituals that enable them to feel a sense of control over the future and to move toward a kind of authority, agency, and autonomy associated with mental health and psychological well-being. Women from many cultural backgrounds and religious perspectives have embraced alternative forms of spiritual expression, based on profound theoretical challenges to mainstream religious beliefs, ranging from calls for the radical reclamation and reconstruction of religious traditions to personal involvement in goddess worship and Wicca. Women’s Spirituality, Women’s Lives presents theoretical, conceptual, and experiential chapters that analyze the extent to which these proliferating women’s groups represent the beginnings of new norms of mental health for women. Women’s Spirituality, Women’s Lives presents a variety of voices, including Native American, Christian, Jewish, and Wiccan. Chapters are divided into three sections--Laying the Groundwork, Theoretical Challenges, and Living It Out--and explore a diverse array of topics such as: the “shouting” church and Black women’s mental health a traditionalist Native American challenge to New Age cooptation a feminist group and Jewish women’s self-identity lesbian altar-making and mental health feminist Wicca in the U.S. and Germany the martial arts and women’s mental health the use of feminist rituals in therapy and as therapy Feminist therapists and theologians, as well as other individuals interested in feminist spirituality or alternative spirituality, will find this book a fascinating exploration of the various aspects of the spirituality of women. Women’s Spirituality, Women’s Lives is also an excellent reader to expand the thinking of students in classes in women’s studies and religious studies.

Author: Laura Vance
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479847992
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
An in-depth history of selected New Religions that highlights the roles of women in their founding and continual practice Women in New Religions offers an engaging look at women’s evolving place in the birth and development of new religious movements. It focuses on four disparate new religions—Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, The Family International, and Wicca—to illuminate their implications for gender socialization, religious leadership and participation, sexuality, and family ideals. Religious worldviews and gender roles interact with one another in complicated ways. This is especially true within new religions, which frequently set roles for women in ways that help the movements to define their boundaries in relation to the wider society. As new religious movements emerge, they often position themselves in opposition to dominant society and concomitantly assert alternative roles for women. But these religions are not monolithic: rather than defining gender in rigid and repressive terms, new religions sometimes offer possibilities to women that are not otherwise available. Vance traces expectations for women as the religions emerge, and transformation of possibilities and responsibilities for women as they mature. Weaving theory with examination of each movement’s origins, history, and beliefs and practices, this text contextualizes and situates ideals for women in new religions. The book offers an accessible analysis of the complex factors that influence gender ideology and its evolution in new religious movements, including the movements’ origins, charismatic leadership and routinization, theology and doctrine, and socio-historical contexts. It shows how religions shape definitions of women’s place in a way that is informed by response to social context, group boundaries, and identity.

Author: Ann Braude
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253056306
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
“Braude has discovered a crucial link between the early feminists and the spiritualists who so captured the American imagination.” —Los Angeles Times In Radical Spirits, Ann Braude contends that the early women’s rights movement and Spiritualism went hand in hand. Her book makes a convincing argument for the importance of religion in the study of American women’s history. In this new edition, Braude discusses the impact of the book on the scholarship of the last decade and assesses the place of religion in interpretations of women’s history in general and the women’s rights movement in particular. A review of current scholarship and suggestions for further reading make it even more useful for contemporary teachers and students. “It would be hard to imagine a book that more insightfully combined gender, social, and religious history together more perfectly than Radical Spirits. Braude still speaks powerfully to unique issues of women’s creativity—spiritual as well as political—in a superb account of the controversial nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement.” —Jon Butler, Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University “Continually rewarding.” —The New York Times Book Review “A fascinating, well-researched, and scholarly work on a peripheral aspect of the rise of the American feminist movement.” —Library Journal “A vitally important book . . . [that] has . . . influenced a generation of young scholars.” —Marie Griffith, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University “An insightful book and a delightful read.” —Journal of American History

Author: Beryl Satter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520229274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Beryl Satter examines New Thought in all its complexity, presenting along the way a captivating cast of characters. In lively and accessible prose, she introduces the people, the institutions, the texts, and the ideas that comprised the New Thought movement.

Author: Theresa Delgadillo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822350467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Demonstrates the centrality of Gloria Anzald&úas concept of spiritual mestizaje to the queer feminist Chicana theorists life and thought, and its utility as a framework for interpreting contemporary Chicana narratives.

Author: Mary Farrell Bednarowski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025321338X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"Explores five ideas that animate the theological imagination of women in religious communities throughout America: ambivalence toward tradition; the immanence, or indwelling, of the divine; the sacredness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the sacred; the vision of the universe as a web of relationships; and healing as a central function of religion"--back cover.