An ambitious history of desire in Anglo-American religion across three centuries.
The pursuit of happiness weaves disparate strands of Anglo-American religious history together. In The Delight Makers, Catherine L. Albanese unravels a theology of desire tying Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson to the religiously unaffiliated today. As others emphasize redemptive suffering, this tradition stresses the metaphysical connection between natural beauty and spiritual fulfillment. In the earth's abundance, these thinkers see an expansive God intent on fulfilling human desire through prosperity, health, and sexual freedom. Through careful readings of Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Esther Hicks, and more, Albanese reveals how a theology of delight evolved alongside political overtures to natural law and individual liberty in the United States.
Title: The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness
Author: Albanese, Catherine L.
ISBN: 9780226823546
Binding:
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2023-01-17
Number of Pages: 384
Weight: 0.6307 kg
What if the history of religion in the United States was primarily understood not through piety or respectability but through desire and delight? That is the wager of this startling book by one of the greatest interpreters of American religion. The pursuit of happiness has never been more sensual, mischievous, or weird. -- Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
The Delight Makers has all the makings of a classic: richly researched, theoretically original, never jargony, often funny, intellectually adventurous, ontologically sympathetic, keenly aware of our present academic context and its moral concerns, and, in the end, responsive to all. I set the book down in a mood I much expected: admiration, perhaps even delight. -- Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University
Here the affections of Jonathan Edwards's theology, the delights of Emerson's nature, and the aspirations of William James's religious psychology commingle with the visions of clairvoyants, the allures of occultists, and the copious promises of mind-cure proponents. The Delight Makers is an expansive and magnetic history of an American cosmology in which longings for beauty, vitality, happiness, and abundance have proven endlessly energizing. -- Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis