“Shoveling fog” is Courtney Bender’s acute phrase for the work of “studying spirituality,” an amorphous term that has suffered much…
Power spots
spirituality
Making sense of the emerging church movement
Two recent contributions from the United Kingdom shed some light on the elusive phenomenon knows as the "emerging church" or,…
Working on individualism
Even the most open-minded social scientists—those who are up for studying almost any social group or activity—tend to find the…
Institutions, discourses, practices… and life-in-the-world
The portraits social scientists create get appropriated by their subjects, used, and fed back to social scientists. Like a Cherokee…
Grasping for authenticity
The New Metaphysicals offers a peek into a world that I found at once pedestrian and strange, and the information…
The dangers of spirituality?
CNN profiles the growing "spiritual but not religious" population, contrasting the views of some who fear that the spiritual turn…
Redeeming the Burning Man
In her newly published book Theater in a Crowded Fire, Lee Gilmore tells the story of the infamous Burning Man Festival,…
Quantum sociology and The New Metaphysicals
At first glance, Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals might appear narrow and idiosyncratic. After all, it's an ethnography of spiritual practitioners in…
The Catholic heresy, again
The reason I am talking about Catholics here is because of the subtitle of Bender's book: Spirituality and the American…
The artist and presence
Much ink, real and digital, has been spent on the closing of the Marina Abramović retrospective The Artist is Present.…