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Zusatztext 'Some texts are genuine gifts to the scholarly community ... Steven Sutcliffe's Children of the New Age is just such a work ... That Children of the New AGe provides the most subtle and informed account of the phenomena to date is to be welcomed.' - Journal of Contemporary Religion'[Sutcliffe] is objective but sympathetic! critical without being judgmental! and his text is invested with the authority that comes form personal field research and the intelligent use of public and private archives.' - The Christian Parapsychologist'Stephen Sutcliffe has provided us with a useful contribution to our knowledge of contemporary spiritualities in Children of the New Age.' - Ron Geaves'This study by Dr Sutcliffe is an insightful contribution tothe 'New Age' phenomenon that will be of real interest to libraries and individual scholars.' - Studies in World Christianity: The Edinburgh Review of Theology and Religion! Issue 9.2 Informationen zum Autor Steven Sutcliffe is affiliated to the University of Stirling. He is the author of numerous journal articles on the New Age and is the co-editor, with Marion Bowman , of Beyond the New Age. Klappentext Children of the New Age, a pioneering history of the New Age phenomenon, combines original ethnographic research with rare archival material to give a definitive overview of New Age belief and practice from the 1930s to the present day. It chronicles the development of alternative spirituality from embryonic beginnings to a universal trend: from its inception within the underground enclaves of Rosicrucians, occultists and Alice Bailey's neo-theosophists to its modern-day incursion into mainstream political, musical and artistic culture. But this is also a distinctly critical history. New Age culture, says Steven J. Sutcliffe, is notoriously variegated and hotly contested, exposed to competing strands of revelation and apocalypse. Caught between the hippy explosion and the doomsday scenarios of millennial Christianity and UFO groups, it has been the preserve both of extreme religious individualists and of humanistic countercultures lauding the Edenic perfection of this worldly existence. At stake in its history are controversial questions of value, and of its perceived status as a discrete and unified "movement." Supported by firsthand accounts of the author's adventures in counterculture, including firewalking, spiritual healing workshops and life within a Findhorn communitiy, and by archival correspondence and publications recovering "lost" history of alternative spirituality during the 1950s and 1960s; this is a thoughtful and colorful survey of the trends and controversies that accompany the concept of New Age. It calls for a fresh understanding of New Age as an emergent and fragmented form of folk idiom, complete with its own revealing loyalties and fractures; not a unified"movement" or "new religion," but a diffuse cultural force reflecting ever-shifting currents of popular sentiment. Zusammenfassung As the first true social history of New Age culture, this presents an unrivalled overview of the diverse varieties of New Age belief and practise from the 1930s to the present day. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: On the Genealogy of the New Age: A Field Note; Part 1: Emblem Chapter One: The Life and Times of 'New Age'; Chapter Two: 'Oligarchy of Elect Souls': Alice Baileys New Age in Context; Chapter Three: The Nameless Ones: Small Groups in the Nuclear Age; Chapter Four: The End is Nigh: Doomsday Premonitions; Part Two: Idiom Chapter Five: Heaven on Earth: From Apocalypse to Self-Realisation; Chapter Six: A Group of Seekers: the Unit of Service; Chapter Seven: A Colony of Seekers: Findhorn; Chapter Eight: A Network of Seekers: Holistic Healing; Chapter Nine: The End of the New Age; Bibliography...
