L57 RelPol 340

Pilgrims and Seekers: American Spirituality from the Transcendentalists to the Millennials

Fall 2018, T 2:30–5:30PM

The seminar focuses on the formation of “spirituality” in American culture from the Transcendentalist world of Ralph Waldo Emerson on through more recent expressions of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” sensibility.

WUCRSL
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The seminar focuses on the formation of “spirituality” in American culture from the Transcendentalist world of Ralph Waldo Emerson on through more recent expressions of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” sensibility. How did “spirituality” come to be seen as something positively distinct from and better than “organized religion”? What are the main contours of spiritual seeking in American culture? The course also explores the social and political consequences of this turn to the spiritual over the religious: for example, the consecration of liberal individualism, the relationship between religious exploration and consumerism, the negotiation of cultural pluralism, and the prophetic search for social justice.

  • This is probably the best class I have taken since I started college. If you are interested by spiritual biography, you have to take this class.

    — Fall 2018

  • I'm really glad I got to read some of the books we read in this class; I likely would not have read them otherwise and they really did teach me a lot about different perspectives in American spirituality.

    — Fall 2018