Restless Souls : The Making of American Spirituality [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Leigh Schmidt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2005

Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age seminars and holistic workshops, The Oprah Winfrey Show and books by Deepak Chopra—all are part of the ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history. By tracing our unique spiritual heritage along its many colorful highways and eccentric byways, Restless Souls profiles a rich spirituality that is distinctively American.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Princeton religious historian Schmidt provides a sweeping and detailed look at the forefathers, and foremothers, of today's spirituality movement. From Emerson and the American Transcendentalists through early yoga exponents and up to media empress Oprah Winfrey, Schmidt labels, links and differentiates the strains of spiritual ferment and longing woven into American religious and cultural history. He claims the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd has always been here, often linked to progressive social and political activists via a social gospel. Having established the appreciable history of American spirituality, Schmidt's last chapter argues against the common critique of it as narcissistic and vapid. It is rather the changing expression of a broad American spiritual left that can counter today's dominant spiritual right. It's as grounded in history as any conservatism but also dynamic and capacious enough to accommodate different paths. Written following the rules of academia—with endnotes citing 19th-century journals and correspondence—yet highly accessible, Schmidt is sympathetic and scholarly about a wide variety of spiritual pilgrims and paths. This is recommended reading for anyone with an interest in American spirituality, and required reading for anyone who thinks spirituality was born after WWII with the baby boomers. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Schmidt's readable and fascinating study examines the development of spirituality in American culture and explores its links to liberal progressivism and the religious left. While many, including journalists, believe American mixing and matching of religious faiths began in the countercultural sixties, Schmidt traces it from Puritan times and portrays it as an aspect of Americans' pioneering spirit. The American invention of spirituality was largely a search for a religious world beyond that of British Protestantism. Schmidt chronicles the rise of nineteenth-century religious liberalism in Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, Quakerism, followers of Emerson and Whitman, Spiritualists, New Thought optimists, Vedantists, and Theosophists. Many figures, famous (Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. DuBois, William James) and now obscure, and topics including homegrown mystics, solitude as a defining feature of American spiritual life (e.g., in the legend of Johnny Appleseed), and the American embrace of such Asian practices as meditation receive Schmidt's attention in this fair-minded study of the historical importance of religious liberalism and its role in modern American spirituality. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper-san Francisco; 1ST edition (September 1, 2005)
• ISBN-10: 0060545666
• ASIN: B000GG4J6E
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,488,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a gem, November 26, 2005

By 

Fred Strohm (Pacifica, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Hardcover)

This book is a gem. It tells the history of what Schmidt calls the "liberal" religious tradition in America. It shows us the golden kernel at the heart of what today is often diluted. Kickboxing yoga enthusiasts no more invalidate Emerson and Whitman, than the Inquisition invalidates Jesus of Nazareth. The book is largely about some wonderful people little known today but influential in their time. These fine folks carried the torch from Emerson and Whitman to the mid-20th century. Schmidt tells their stories beautifully, and reading about them is a joy. I can't think of a better use of our time than reading about great souls like Thomas Kelly, Max Ehrmann, and Sarah Farmer.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Subject worth exploring misses the mark, May 6, 2009

By 

Mark Gilbert (Lakewood CO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Hardcover)

I excitiedly picked up this book when it came out but only recently found the time to sit down with it. The topic is one that I am fascinated by and have studied a bit. I walked away at the end overall disappointed. That is not to say the book does not have merit.

First the pluses...

The subject matter....as the cultural creatives or integral inclined individuals who are "spiritual but not religious" look to see the pattern or history in America that has been brewing on the cutting edge of religious/spiritual thought the last 150 years or so...the subject is a timely one that needs to be fully explored....thanks for taking it on.

Covering some of the essential forces.....Emerson and the transcendentalists are explored and cited.

A few engaging stories of lesser known influences.....I liked the stories of Ralph Waldo Trine (with whom I have read and was familiar) and Sarah Farmer (with whom I was not).

Now the minuses....

The format of chapters focusing on some topic (e.g., meditation) and how they impacted our growth....this seemed forced, there was too much overlap of the stories with the details of those brought out in other chapters and led to each chapter jumping around to bring too many short references to other influences that maybe related to the chapter's "topic".

The author's writing style was not always engaging. Some of his stories engaged (as mentioned), but (and this may be a product of how he outlined his chapters into topics) there seemed to be too much jumping around. He could have benefited from using a bit more of a sequential fact telling to help his reader stay with the overall story....bottom line was that there were really engaging stories within chapters and they were strung together with other details that led to the overall direction of the chapter being somewhat lost.

The biggest complaint.....so many major influences upon the modern desire for spiritual experiences were either not in the book or only briefly mentioned in some passing reference (or were mentioned sporactically as he wanted to make a point about them in this themed chapters, hence losing the importance of them). For example, he mentions New Thought collectively but primarily points at Dresser as the entire subject. He does mention some of Quimby and a bit of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science in reference to NT but most NT scholars quickly point out that Christian Science is not truly New Thought...readers of this book would think that it is. Major New Thought influences are not mentioned at all! Where is Emma Curtis Hopkins, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (Unity), or Ernest Holmes (Science of Mind)? All had much more lasting influence than Dresser or Trine....and in the more popular culture, where is Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, or Napoleon Hill? Where are other major Eastern influences such as Yogananda? I could go on....If this truly is the "making of American Spirituality" as the title implies, then this books greatest failure is one of omission of very real and vital influences upon that topic.

Finally, the payoff on current culture in the book seemed to be reduced to pitting traditional conservative Christians vs the "Church of Oprah". Although Oprah certainly is an influence, she is more indicative of the maturing of Americans such that those few who were on the cutting edge of sprituality in the 19th century are now growing in numbers due to more and more people transcending old worldviews and moving into what has been labeled the cultural creatives (or the green and higher meme levels in Spiral Dynamics). This natural evolution of our culture is the end game story which the author overlooked.

I would have given this book 2 1/2 stars if possible....kudos for tackling the topic....kudos for some engaging stories of a few of the influences on American spirituality....however for someone looking for the "making of American spirituality", please know that you are getting only certain interesting pieces of background presented to you without a full picture of what is truly unfolding in our current society.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Idea of Religious Liberalism Made Clear, December 18, 2006

By 

C. L. Vash (Altadena, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Restless Souls : The Making of American Spirituality (Hardcover)

This is what this book has done for me. I have attended Unitarian churches but never understood how "liberal" ... a political term, it seemed to me ... related to religion. Now I get it. If I were still teaching graduate psychology courses to health and rehabilitation practitioners, I'd include this book as required reading for a course designed to help them deal with the DEEP problems of people with illnesses and disabilities without getting into religious proselyting.