Spiritual But Not Religious: Making Spirituality in America

Catalog description

When people call themselves "spiritual but not religious,” what does that mean? This course answers that question by exploring many of the diverse ideas, practices, and desires that the idea of spirituality has included. To see how spirituality has saturated American society, students will examine phenomena such as yoga, hip hop, ghosts, self-help gurus, countercultures, and protest movements. By studying the making of spirituality in the past and present, this course will enable students to recognize how Americans have made sense of their own lives and institutional attachments through shifting concepts of race, pluralism, science, capitalism, secularism, and more.