Introduction
To many, any history of the modern subject absent spirituality is, if not misbegotten, then certainly incomplete. That is, to investigate modern spirituality is to inquire into the nature of human nature, including debates on subjectivity, inner experience, ontology, affectivity and human consciousness writ large. At its best, scholarship on spirituality moves beyond reductive accounts of human consciousness to mind or brain to remind scholars in any number of fields – religion, sociology, biology, neurology, physics, philosophy, neuropsychology, cognition, and psychology – of the complicatedness of consciousness, and, by extension, of how we imagine what it is to be human from the inside out and the outside in. “The range of Spiritualist views,” writes Ann Taves (1999), “fell along a continuum with Nature as the (sole) source of all revelation at one end and the Bible as the sole source of revelation at the other” (p. 184). To invoke nature was to locate the source of...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Bayer, B. M. (2008). Wonder in a world of struggle. Subjectivity, 23, 156–174.
Bender, C., & McRoberts, O. (2012). Mapping a field: Why and how to study spirituality. Brooklyn, NY: SSRC Working Papers.
Coon, D. (1992). Testing the limits of sense and science: American experimental psychologists combat spiritualism, 1880–1920. American Psychologist, 47(2), 143–151.
Ellwood, R. S. (1997). The fifties spiritual marketplace: American religion in a decade of conflict. New brunswik, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Harrington, A. (2008). The cure within: A history of mind-body medicine. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Heelas, P. (2006). Challenging secularization theory: The growth of ‘new age’ spiritualities of life. Hedgehog Review, 8(1 & 2), 46–58.
Herrnstein Smith, B. (2009). Natural reflections: Human cognition at the Nexus of science and religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
James, W. (1892/1986). “What psychical research has accomplished” in Essays in Psychical Research (pp. 89–106). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Random House.
James, W. (1909/1986). Confidences of a “Psychical Researcher” in Essays in psychical research (pp. 361–375). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kontou, T., & Willburn, S. (Eds.). (2012). The ashgate companion to nineteenth- century spiritualism and the occult. Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
McGarry, M. (2008). Ghosts of futures past: Spiritualism and the cultural politics of nineteenth-century America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Modern, J. L. (2011). Secularism in antebellum America. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Robinson, M. (2010). Absence of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schmidt, E. L. (2005). Restless souls: The making of American spirituality. New York: Harper San Francisco.
Taves, A. (1999). Fits, trances, & visions: Experiencing religion and explaining experience from welsey to James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wingrove, E. (2005). Ontology: A useful category of analysis. The Hedgehog Review, 7(2), 86–92.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Bayer, B.M. (2014). Spirituality. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_298
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_298
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-5582-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-5583-7
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Sciences