day of the dead
The above discusses social Darwinism, eugenics and race, and ends with a chapter on the occult. It is referenced five times in The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition, a book which
...explores the historical roots of what [author James Herrick] calls the "New Religious Synthesis." This synthesis, which brings together streams of thought from Darwin to Swedenborg to Jung, is challenging the "Revealed Word" tradition of historical Christianity with increasing success thanks to its doctrinal flexibility and knack for public relations. (Herrick amply documents the popularizing instincts of several centuries' worth of spiritual innovators, from medieval kabbalists to Joseph Campbell.) Herrick is clearly no fan of the New Religious Synthesis, and his tone wavers between academic detachment and disdain. But he does an impressive job of showing just how continuously a tradition of pantheism, evolutionary thinking, mysticism and shamanism has existed in Western culture, thus dispelling the notion that today's alternative spiritualities are either genuinely new or a leap over history into a purer past.
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