The New Age Movement: Religion, Culture and Society in the Age of Postmodernity Book

The size of Heelas's book (266 pp.) belies the massive substance contained within it. The fundamental theme that emerges as the connective tissue to the otherwise loose amalgam of practices and world views is "self-spirituality," or the preoccupation with the self and the exercise of its inherent authority and freedom. The foundation for the emergence of this self-spirituality is the belief that life in this present world is not what it should be, but that the capacity to liberate the self from its confines and the oppressions of current existence can be teased out and disciplined in order to achieve liberation and perfection. Heelas offers a plausible argument to show that the beliefs and values of the constellation of spiritual practices that constitute the New Age Movement are responses (reactions?) to the cultural and intellectual contours of modernity. He also argues that the New Age Movement is neither "new" nor a "movement." Rather, its differing groups draw variously on insights, practices and teachings that can be found in the traditions of the great world religions (especially from the East) in a syncretistic fashion, and they lack the unifying vision and social practices otherwise associated with cultural and religious movements. Nevertheless, he suggests, they are here to stay, though perhaps destined ever to be small and obscure as players in the larger sociocultural world of western societies. As a social scientist and anthropologist, he offers the treatment of his subject with the appropriate objectivity and distance of methodological "agnosticism."