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The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898
by Dominic Green
The late nineteenth century was an age of grand ideas and great expectations fueled by rapid scientific and technological innovation. In Europe, the ancient authority of church and crown was overthrown for the volatile gambles of democracy and the capitalist market.
If it was an age that claimed to liberate women, slaves, and serfs, it also harnessed children to its factories and subjected entire peoples to its empires. Amid this tumult, another sea change was underway: the religious revolution.
In The Religious Revolution, Dominic Green charts this profound cultural and political shift, taking us on a whirlwind journey through the lives and ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; of Éliphas Lévi and Helena Blavatsky; of Wagner and Nietzsche; of Marx, Darwin, and Gandhi. Challenged by the industrialization, globalization, and political unrest of their times, these figures found themselves connecting with the religious impulse in surprising new ways, inspiring others to move away from the strictures of religion and toward the thrill and intimacy of spirituality. The modern era is often characterized as a time of increasing secularism, but in this trenchant new work, Green demonstrates how the foundations of modern society were laid as much by spirituality as by science or reason.
The Religious Revolution is a narrative tour de force that sweeps across several continents and five of the most turbulent and formative decades in history. Threading together seemingly disparate intellectual trajectories, Green illuminates how philosophers, grifters, artists, scientists, and yogis shared in a global cultural moment, borrowing one another's beliefs and making the world we know today.
"Critic and historian Green delivers an incisive study of the Western world's shift from institutional religion to more personal beliefs in the second half of the 19th century...[He] draws illuminating connections between...transformational thinkers and briskly contextualizes the political, economic, and technological shocks of their epoch. This is intellectual history at its most comprehensive and convincing." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Green] weaves a tapestry that brings together the various strands that the spiritual/religious revival exhibited in the 19th century, showing the interrelations and aspects of the thought of individuals which only come to light when they are seen in the context of their times. While some of Green's interpretations might not stand up to academic criticism, he does offer a fascinating picture of the intellectual world of the late 19th century." - Library Journal (starred review)
This information about The Religious Revolution was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dominic Green, PhD, FRHistS is a critic, historian and the deputy editor of the Spectator's US edition. He writes widely on the arts and current affairs, and contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion. He is the author of the books Three Empires of the Nile, Armies of God, Benny Green: Words and Music, and The Double Life of Doctor Lopez. He lives in Cambridge, MA.
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