- Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America, by
Taylor, Eugene.
(Hardcover 1999, Paperback 2000). Counterpoint Books.
ISBN: 1887178805
Description: Paperback, 320 pages.
- Eugene Taylor, PhD, is Lecturer on Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and the 1983 William James Lecturer on the Varieties of Religious Experience at Harvard Divinity School. (William James is regarded as the father of American psychology, and both he and his birth father were vital Swedenborgians in the Boston area.) Dr. Taylor is also the Vice-President of the Chapel's Swedenborgian Cambridge Society, and the author of "A Psychology of Spiritual Healing" and "Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America"
- Book Reviews:
(Amazon.com)
"Although critics would have New Age spirituality deemed trendy and fleeting, author and religious scholar Eugene Taylor offers a convincing testament to the historical worthiness and longevity of the alternative spirituality movement. Taylor, who is a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, explains that the New Age movement is a historically rooted movement that blends psychology and spirit. In fact, he calls it the "Third Great Awakening" in American religious life--an awakening that always springs from a "shadow culture" (most recently, the counterculture rebellion of the '60s). What makes this a fascinating read is its extensive and smoothly presented research. Taylor documents the "First Great Awakening," which dates back to the puritans and mystics of the 1600s and 1700s. Stretching forward in time, he presents the "Second Great Awakening," with profiles of leaders such as Emerson and Thoreau. This fascinating discussion elevates the New Age movement to an evolutionary necessity, which will no doubt raise the ire or gratitude of American readers." --Gail Hudson
This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title. Both hardcover and paperback may be ordered online from Amazon.com
(Kirkus Reviews)
"An informed history, description, and analysis of more than 200 years of alternative-religion and pop-psych counterculture movements....[An] erudite study of psycho-spiritual inquiry."
(The author's comments on the reviews above)
"First, I was impressed with Gail Hudson's statement, as not all reviewers actually read the book. Obviously, she has, and has locked on to one of the more subtle points of the work; namely, that the New Age, as it is called mostly by detractors who do not really know what it is (I do not employ the term on the book), is actually part of a larger historical cycle of spiritual renewal at the core of North American Judeo-Christian culture, which, since the Revolution, we can define as a spiritual democracy. I should add as a minor point in an otherwise good statement that I am not a lecturer on psychology at Harvard, but a Lecturer on Psychiatry. I am also an Executive Faculty member at Saybrook Graduate School.
Second, the Kirkus Review by and large gets the point of the book. [The collection of crank literature from turn-of-the-century New England was assembled by William James; I only had access to the collection courtesy of the Harvard Libraries. And the Henry James to which I referred in the book was Henry James Jr., William's son, the lawyer and Harvard overseer, not Henry James, the novelist, his uncle and William's younger brother.] The point made at the end about Madison Avenue might seem confusing at first, but it is true that the various psychospiritual traditions survived because they often exterted a substantial influence over the American popular printing industry and therefore the mass media. The Ephrata Cloister in the 1730s became known partly because of its beautiful hymnals; the Fox sisters became famous for their spirit rappings in 1848 because Horance Greely sent reporters from the New York Tribune who proclaimed nationwide that the girls were absolutely genuine; Fowler and Wells, the phrenologists; Mary Baker Eddy, and also Sigmund Freud all controlled their own publishing houses; while Werner Erhard based est partly on the motivational training program he learned selling the Great Books series. Also, the somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement the reviewer makes that you will not find your inner Swami by reading this history is partly mitigated by the fact that *Shadow Culture* is actually a companion volume to *A Psychology of Spiritual Healing* (West Chester, PA: Chrysalis Books), which makes the case for why some people care about the inward journey toward self-realization and, if one does, how we harness a patient's beliefs for healing."
- See also the Cambridge Chapel's Annual Wilfred Gould Rice Memorial Lecture on Psychology and Religion, at which Dr. Taylor presents.
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