A Republic of Mind & Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine Albanese

I am awake: A case for Buddhist psychology as a theoretical orientation for spiritual but not religious clients

“…SBNR people with previous religious affiliation experienced tension between their focus on finding themselves from within rather than turning to an external or divine source as they may have once done prior to becoming SBNR (Mercadante, 2020). Additionally, because many SBNR people do not place trust in religious institutions to give them answers about identity and finding one's self (i.e., being a child of God), the burden of self‐actualization is on the SBNR individual, which can be anxiety‐provoking and isolating given their own individual transformation is not clearly answered through any one process (Albanese, 2007; Fuller, 2001; Hanegraaff, 1998; Heelas, 1996; Heelas et al., 2005; Mercadante, 2014; Schmidt, 2005). Furthermore, SBNR people may encounter a tortuous circle of searching as the self is both agent and object of transformation.…”

Psychic investigators: Anthropology, modern spiritualism, and credible witnessing in the late Victorian age. EframSera‐Shriar, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. 222 pages. $50 (cloth). ISBN: 978‐0‐8229‐4707‐3.

“…Whereas before they were cast as marginal “flights from reason” and thus to be devalued, today, there is recognition of their enduring cultural, religious, medical, scientific, and literary cache. Mesmerism, Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, psychical research, theosophy, mind cure, and New Thought fit into this body of work (Albanese, 2007). This newer scholarship questions the older triumphalist narrative so often featured in twentieth century texts describing scientifically sophisticated men ejecting as irrational the beliefs and practices of any number of spiritually minded peoples, psychics, or metaphysicians who did not subscribe to their hard rational facts.…”