American Gurus

Arthur Versluis, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Professor in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University, holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has published numerous books and articles. Versluis was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Germany, and is the founding editor of Esoterica, and co-editor of JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism. He is the founding president of the Association for the Study of Esotericism.

• 1. Introduction ; Nineteenth-Century Enlightenments ; 2. Revivalism, Romanticism, and the Protestant Principle ; 3. The Sage of Concord ; 4. Emerson and Platonism ; 5. The Concord School and American Platonism ; 6. Walt Whitman's Cosmic Consciousness ; Enlightened Literature ; 7. American Spiritual Teachers ; 8. Beat Religion and The Choice ; 9. Enter Psychedelics ; 10. Dogmas, Catmas, and Spiritual Anarchism ; 11. "Oh, ho, ho, it's magic" ; 12. Spiritual Anarchy, Tantra, and Islamic Heterodoxy ; 13. On the Counterculture ; American Gurus ; 14. From Europe to America ; 15. Varieties of Modern American Mysticism ; 16. The Sage on the Stage ; 17. The American Guru Enters, Stage Left ; 18. The Immediatist Wave ; 19. Conclusions

The first truly thoughtful history of an important aspect of religion in North America...American Gurus acts as a handy source of short intellectual biographies of some of the movement's lesser known figures of whom there has previously been very little publicly available information. As such, it is a valuable source for religious studies researchers.