What Matters?

Courtney Bender, associate professor of religion at Columbia University, is the author of The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, winner of the 2011 AAP PROSE Award for Excellence in Scholarly Publishing in Theology/Religious Studies, and coeditor, with Pamela Klassen, of After Pluralism: Reimagining Models of Interreligious Engagement. Ann Taves is professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and past president of the American Academy of Religion. Her most recent books include Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things, winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James, winner of the 2000 Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy and Religion.

• Introduction: Things of Value From a Materialist Ethic to the Spirit of Prehistory Conquering Religious Contagions and Crowds: Nineteenth-Century Psychologists and the Unfinished Subjugation of Superstition and Irrationality Religious and Secular, "Spiritual" and "Physical" in Ghana Volunteer Experience Secular Humanitarianism and the Value of Life Homeschooling the Enchanted Child: Ambivalent Attachments in the Domestic Southwest Mind Matters: Esalen's Sursem Group and the Ethnography of Consciousness Tribalism, Experience, and Remixology in Global Psytrance Culture Acknowledgments Contributors Index

A window onto how spirituality has functioned as a social category that bestows value on even 'secular' objects, What Matters? brilliantly demystifies spirituality without banishing spirits. With an embarrassment of riches at hand, including paranormal shadows in 'real' science, turns to 'tribalism' in psytrance festivals, and 'spiritual' motivations within secular humanitarianism, these essays are an original foray into how spirituality is used to account for contemporary human experience, with piety and irony in play. -- Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto, author of Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity ...a helpful classroom resource. -- Ryan Harper Sociology of Religion