The New Age movement : the celebration of the self and the sacralization of modernity

In his ground-breaking work, Paul Heelas traces the growth and development of the New Age Movement, identifies some of its key characteristics, and provides a critical perspective.This unique and extensively documented volume provides a balanced treatment of New Age "celebration of the self", and situates it within the broader cultural context for the first time. It shows how the New Age is ambivalently related to modernity, offering both a radical spiritual alternative to the mainstream and a celebration of some of the characteristic features of modern life. Heelas thus views the New Age both as an alternative counter-cultural movement and as a spirituality of our times. The volume, with its clarity of form and its critique of conventional opinion, serves as an excellent starting point and mature contribution to the study of contemporary spirituality. This will be a core text for courses on the Sociology of Religion, and should be of enormous interest to all those concerned with the study of culture and the utopian anthropologists of modernity, historians of oppositional movements, theology students, clergy, and New Age activists alike. Drawing on a wide range of examples from Europe and America, Paul Heelas offers a sociological reading of the new age movement