[.ca] The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to ...

Book Description:
This lively and highly accessible book presents a fascinating picture of belief in the western world. Drawing on an in-depth locality study of religion and spirituality in the English town of Kendal, Cumbria, this book addresses the most pressing question in the study of religion today: are new forms of spirituality overtaking traditional forms of religion, particularly Christianity? By combining pioneering findings from Kendal with existing evidence from the USA and Europe, this book shows that there is a good deal to support the claim that a spiritual revolution is well underway in the UK and arguably even further advanced in the USA. In explaining this development, the volume offers a new theoretical approach to the study of contemporary religion which can help make sense of both secularization and sacralization, and which leads to some startling predictions about the future of religion and spirituality in the west.

Aimed at the Statistician:
This book was a bit of a disappointment to me since it is long on reporting research statistics and analyzing survey results and short on philosophical or cultural discussion. It fairly well chronicles the shift in some demographic groups from "religion" to "spirituality" but it does so from a rather detached, clinical standpoint. If you are on board with the new spirituality and are looking to read an apology for your change or, if you are deeply opposed to such a transition and consider yourself an unbendging traditionalist in religion, you probably won't find what you're looking for in this book. North American readers should be advised also that the focus of the study is a demographic survey of an English town in the U.K.

Fascinating, but too much research for the general reader:
The book attempts to study the rise of spirituality through the in depth study of one community, its different "religious" and "spiritual" practices and their change over time. For those who are just interested in the general theory-- that "subjectavism" has caused the attractiveness of new pratices -- the detailed information about the specific community is a bit cumbersome, but probably necessary for specialists who need to be convinced that the thesis is true.