Grassroots Spirituality: What It Is, Why It Is Here, Where It Is Going

We've all known that there are lots of people interested in spirituality in the US and Europe. But what that has meant has been vague. Are there lots of different little movements? Is the interest passing and silly, as the press might have it? Or is there something important and culture changing here?In what I found to be a readable and very well researched book, Robert Forman and his team show that there really is something in this movement. No wonder it won the Bross Prize for the best manuscript in the study of religion recently. For the book portrays a remarkably coherent, astonishingly large, and era-appropriate movement. Forman shows that millions of people seem to have discovered, largely independently of each other and without a single Pope or guru, a roughly similar way to look at the world and find their own spiritual depths. Be their training Buddhist, Jewish, Christian or shamistic, people seem to have discovered something similar.Their focus is on a new way to encounter or understand the spiritual "reality." Rather than the traditional view of a God "out there" or "up there," people in this movement now encounter a divine that is both beyond themselves and also within. Out and in, which Forman calls "panentheistic." But the real point is that apparently there is enough common ground among all these people that there is now enough common ground that people in this world should be able to productively talk and learn from their differences. The book promises that spriitual people should be able to form communities of empathy, addressing the common feeling of lonliness in the path that Forman found. For anyone interested in what's going on in the spirituality world, its causes and its future, this will be the classic in the field.