New Religions in Global Perspective A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World

New Religions in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World By Peter Clarke
2006 | 373 Pages | ISBN: 0415257484 | PDF | 3 MB
"New Religions in Global Perspectives" by Peter B. Clarke (2006) is a good book, especially if you are interested in how humanity's religious sentiment is expressed in different and similar ways across societies and cultures in the modern (and so-called postmodern) world. Clarke's book is less profound than Needleman & Baker's (1981) classic "Understanding the New Religions." It provides, however, a more balanced view of so-called New Age Movements (NAMs) than presented by Lewis & Melton's (1992) edited "Perspectives on the New Age." Clarke thankfully avoids the polemics and loaded language that characterizes such books as Peters' (1991) "The Cosmic Self" and LeBar's (1989) "Cults, Sects, and the New Age," which not infrequently disparage NAMs as alterative faith systems to Christianity that turn man into God, while disingenuously accepting alternative conventionally-held Christian doctrinal tenets that turn God into man and the notion that the Son of God could be contained in one human frame. Drawbacks to the text are its cost, its over-attention to detail, and repetitiveness. The sticker price of the book is a bit of a shock. It costs over $100 "used" as of this writing which I consider over-priced, especially for an Amazon.com book. My recommendation is to have an academic library purchase the book (or obtain a copy through interlibrary loan) and then borrow it as a patron to read. The first two chapters that provide defining characteristics of NRMs and NAMs are the best chapters of the book. Subsequent chapters outline NRMs as they appear in Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. These characteristics are presented in such excruciating detail that the global forest becomes lost in the local trees. The repetitiveness occurs as the author tries to make connections among the diverse geographical regions -- connections that are repeated within each chapter -- to establish the book's "global perspective" and to point out similarities across the multiple and diverse forms that spirituality and religion take in the human species. Positively, this is a scholarly work with references and a selected bibliography at the end of each chapter. These bibliographies are helpful aids for the student of cross-cultural psychology who is interested in pursuing the innovative character of new religious movements in more depth. One evocative idea that comes out of Clarke's work is the notion of "glocalization" -- the process of shaping the local religion and being shaped by it. It draws readers' attention to the emergence of "a new class (of seekers) that neither belongs nor believes. . . Even where affiliation to one faith only is still considered important, doctrinal tenets are increasingly seen as matters of personal opinion. . . .The possibility of multiple belonging becomes much more likely as religions come to reshape each other" (pp. 4-5). In other words, the various NRM and NAMs are shaping rather than displacing the form and content of traditional world religions, and giving rise to spirituality over religion and personal praxis over doctrinal tenets. Clarke's global perspective is appreciated at a time when much conventional research into the psychology of religion and spirituality is covertly ethnocentric. It complements the cross-cultural approach that academic fields such as transpersonal studies take in their study of the religious change that we as a species are experiencing today. For these reasons, this reader has found Clarke's book to be a welcomed addition to the scholarly literature of religious and spiritual change in the modern world.