Beyond Religion and the Secular: Creative Spiritual Movements and their Relevance to Political, Social and Cultural Reform

by W. H. Hudson

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Academic

, 2022

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion', this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect.

Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá'ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives.

Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.

Features

Reevaluates the contribution of new religious movements to public culture
Advances a disaggregative approach to the study of movements described as 'religious'
Includes global case studies from the Middle East, Japan, India and the United States

Contents

1. Rethinking the Terrain
2. The Bahá'ís: Prosociality and Global Civilisation
3. Soka Gakkai and Cosmic Humanism
4. Ananda Marga and Bengali Futurism
5. Brahma Kumaris: Between Apocalypse and Modernism
6. The Church Universal and Triumphant: Democratic Fictionality
7. The Latter-day Saints: Charismatic Restoration
8. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Praise for Beyond Religion and the Secular

A refreshing and probing approach to new religious movements that makes one think again about their cultural and social productivity.

This book takes a fresh look at new religions, demonstrating that if one looks beyond the clichés and the negative publicity, new religions have under-appreciated cognitive resources, meaningful spiritual practices, innovative organizational features and unexpected creativity, producing cultural and social formations that may have much to teach the rest of the world.

Product Details

• Title: Beyond Religion and the Secular: Creative Spiritual Movements and their Relevance to Political, Social and Cultural Reform
• Author: W. H. Hudson
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2022
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781350331730, 9781350331716, 1350331716, 1350331732
• Resource ID: LLS:9781350331730
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-09T08:27:57Z

About W. H. Hudson

William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) was an author and naturalist. Hudson was born in Argentina, the son of English and American parents. There, he studied local plants and animals as a young man, publishing his findings in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, in a mixture of English and Spanish. Hudson’s familiarity with nature was readily evident in later novels such as A Crystal Age and Green Mansions. He later aided the founding of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.