Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America

By Eugene Taylor

Book Overview

A modern Varieties of Religious Experience that traces the sources of the New Age movement through three hundred years of alternative spirituality.. America is witnessing a third Great Awakening, an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1887178805
• ISBN13: 9781887178808
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Great Explanation of America's Shadow

Eugene Taylor offers a great explanation of the shadow culture in America since the first Great Awakening in this book. He explains every aspect of the spiritual history of the United States, including the Quakers, Shakers, Transcendentalists, Swamis, and even the counter-culture of the 1960s. I especially enjoyed the section on the Americanization of the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in psychology or religious studies. As a student of both, I found this book to be an excellent mixture of both disciplines.

A remarkable hisotory of American's visionary tradition.

"Boring"--the pet phrase of the adolescent who's "little gray cells" have been overstretched by too much stimulation--is far from a correct portrayal of this fine book. It is a deeply intelligent, constantly fascinating, and highly readable account of the entire sweep of American spirituality, folk psychology, and the American visionary tradition from their beginnings in colonial days. From the visionaries and mystics of early 1700s, to the Quakers and Shakers, to Swedenborg, Blavatsky, and the New England Transcendentalists, and on to the Americanization of Jung and Freud, and finally to the modern transpersonal psychologies and spiritually inspired alternative therapies, this is a record of the passions and history of American spiritual life never before recorded with such clarity. Don't be fooled by trash reviews written by rash undergraduates (of all ages). This is a story without precedent, a landmark in American spiritual and intellectual history written by one of the foremost historians of our age.