Beyond Religion and the Secular

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion' this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect.<br/> <br/> Specifically Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá'ís a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical resulting in a wide range of social educational and cultural initiatives.<br/> <br/> Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.