The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition

Rating:
Summary: Things are never as simple as they appear...
Review: A fine book. While the them of this work contrasts "Revealed Word" religion with the "New Spirituality" rather than just focusing on Christian (revealed word) perspectives, Herrick expands his investigation of New Age to throughly trawl our society's quest for transcendence. This work has acted to focus many threads of thought I have suspected for a while, particularly the popularity of Eastern mysticism and the quasi-mystical language of pop-science, as is the case with Carl Sagan and Dick Dawkins. Furthermore, it is rather serious in it's exposition of the background spirituality of many famous "secular" thinkers of the 18-20th centuries. It turns out many of these paragons of logic were as mired in "irrational" behaviour as the proles they scorned.

Rating:
Summary: sheep's clothing ...
Review: I agree with earlier reviews on two points: that the writing here is rather stiff and formalistic; and that Herrick's reach as a researcher is broad and inclusive.

Rather than an objective look at the evolving nature of western spirituality, however, Herrick has a bias toward what he calls the "Revealed Word" (i.e. mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition) and believes that the "New Religious Synthesis" (i.e. the flowering of new spiritual approaches in the last century) is no substitute. In fact, he writes in his conclusion, new forms of personal, "gnostic" spirituality promote "a self-aggrandizing substitute for an authentic religious faith" -- thus dismissing the dozens of remarkable thinkers he's chronicled in the previous 250 pages.

I have found that the writings of Joseph Campbell, Jack Kornfield, Mark Epstein, Carl Sagan and various others who could loosely be defined as "neo-gnostics" have awakened my spiritual life in a way that my church upbringing never did. I appreciate that Herrick is open-minded and does not use fundamentalist language to hammer home his points, but I suspect that this is a tract disguised as non-fiction.



Rating:
Summary: Fantastic research; writing could be improved
Review: The research that went into this book is impressive. There really is a lot of sound, historical meat. My only beef is with the quality of the writing itself. The way the author constantly includes hand-tipping phrases like "In the next chapter we are going to be looking at..." is not state-of-the-art writing. I teach my high school students to avoid references to yourself, and to avoid telling the reader what you're about to tell him, because it gets in the way of the actual ideas presented in the writing. Just say it. Just write it.
Francis Schaeffer didn't tell you what he was going to tell you; Francis Schaeffer just told you. Francis Schaeffer didn't need summary conclusions at the end of every chapter, too.
I also wish the author would've expressed more of his contrary, biblically held opinions (without referring to himself) alongside the nefarious gnostic opinions he writes about. A non-believer could go some way through parts of this book without being apprised that these gnostic beliefs were/are actually mistaken.
All that said, taken as a whole and as a piece of research, the book is nearly impeccable. Well worth reading.
P.S. I got this from my pastor at my church, and some of my fellow parishioners actually apparently know the author. They tell me he is amazingly intelligent. I believe them. There is a LOT of knowledge packed in this book.