- Paperback: 284 pages
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press; New edition edition (1 July 1991)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0226011461
- ISBN-13: 978-0226011462
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.5 x 0.2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,579,513 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
This ground-breaking study reveals an unorganized and previously unacknowledged religion at the heart of American culture. Nature, Albanese argues, has provided a compelling religious center throughout American history.
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In 1634 the Jesuit Paul le Jeune completed a report on his Quebec mission for his provincial in Paris, including in it a long account of his sojourn-and difficulties-among the Montagnais Indians. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
In 1634 the Jesuit Paul le Jeune completed a report on his Quebec mission for his provincial in Paris, including in it a long account of his sojourn-and difficulties-among the Montagnais Indians. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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3 reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
New Age blatherskite
25 Feb 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
from a University of Chicago Professor of Religious Studies, I expected something more approaching a genuine religious studies study. Instead, by the end of the book, Albanese is singing the praises of Sun Bear, Starhawk, Reiki, "Zen" Macrobiotics, and burbling on about various aspects of quantum flapdoodle. She would have done well to read more carefully Russell McCutcheon's seminal Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Suny Series, Issues in the Study of Religion), wherein he explains why Religious Studies should remain a field of critical inquiry and not a bully pulpit for pre-convinced religionists to proselytize from.
February 27 update: After writing this, I went back to _Critics Not Caretakers_ and realized that McCutcheon references Albanese several times in that book. Here's a salient clip from p. 66...
"In constructing a field solely concerned with getting to the deep core, the kernel, or the ahistorical essence, we may have argued ourselves out of business when it comes to developing critical commentary on the mechanisms whereby privileges are bestowed, revoked, and contested in our own society. Although we may have gained personal enlightenment through the use of our hermeneutical skills, as Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade advocated, we end up like the solitary renunciant; we have forgone our name and identify, we do not really have a way of putting it all into words or of communicating anything to our fellows; we have taken refuge from the society in which we live. As Catherine Albanese has rightly - though perhaps unwittingly - observed, 'scholars of religion... find in the mental worlds they create and construct a *refuge* and *safe haven* from the general assaults of change that come with time's passing' (1995: 222; emphasis added). It is in constructing just such a 'safe haven' that we find evidence of our complicity with power."
February 27 update: After writing this, I went back to _Critics Not Caretakers_ and realized that McCutcheon references Albanese several times in that book. Here's a salient clip from p. 66...
"In constructing a field solely concerned with getting to the deep core, the kernel, or the ahistorical essence, we may have argued ourselves out of business when it comes to developing critical commentary on the mechanisms whereby privileges are bestowed, revoked, and contested in our own society. Although we may have gained personal enlightenment through the use of our hermeneutical skills, as Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade advocated, we end up like the solitary renunciant; we have forgone our name and identify, we do not really have a way of putting it all into words or of communicating anything to our fellows; we have taken refuge from the society in which we live. As Catherine Albanese has rightly - though perhaps unwittingly - observed, 'scholars of religion... find in the mental worlds they create and construct a *refuge* and *safe haven* from the general assaults of change that come with time's passing' (1995: 222; emphasis added). It is in constructing just such a 'safe haven' that we find evidence of our complicity with power."
6 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Indispensible for studying U.S. Religious History
23 Mar 2005
Format:Paperback
Catherine Albanese's treatise on Nature Religion in the U.S. is probably her best known work, although it is by no means her only area of focus. In this volume, she defines and defends what she calls "Nature Religion."
And its an impressive set of drawn-out sketches and themes-- admittedly just one of many possible ways to map this space. Algonkian Amerindian religion is impressively overviewed, and the role of "Nature" here (a European concept) is dissolved into a complex interlocking set of relationships between Powers, Places, and Persons, both Human and Other-Than-Human. For the Puritans, Nature was abstracted into all that was "Other," usually a place of wilderness and evil--a Place to be feared. Although, as Albanese points out, precedents exist in Christian history for the wilderness as a place of testing and purification. The new republicanism from the conservative American "revolution" fostered a "wilderness eucharist" mentality--holding Nature sacred as something to be ingested, thereby becomed (and overcomed).
Yet other turns no less revelant today are covered. Transcendentalism and its associated 'heathen' ambiguous reverance for Nature are documented, both in the paradoxical sense of Nature as the Ultimate and Nature as a illusion (or correspondence for the Ultimate. Both of these senses are inherited in contemporary Goddess worship and the different, but related phenomenon of New Age religion, while each of them individually leads Albanese to wilderness preservation ideology and Christian Science/Mind cure movements.
For Albanese, this protean concept contains its own multivalency, its own pluralism, and therefore tends to recede in influence and importance the more a particular offshoot institutionalizes and fossilizes. It is a voice more suited to a prophetic mindset than a priestly mindset, although that too could be possible, it seems. Excellent and challenging work to uncover and begin to document this counter-covenantal thread throughout American history and religion. Albanese freely admits to inventing the term herself--but she is correct in that using it as a frame of reference, for both elite and popular culture, for both empirical and cultural facts, tells us something very important about religion in the United States.
And its an impressive set of drawn-out sketches and themes-- admittedly just one of many possible ways to map this space. Algonkian Amerindian religion is impressively overviewed, and the role of "Nature" here (a European concept) is dissolved into a complex interlocking set of relationships between Powers, Places, and Persons, both Human and Other-Than-Human. For the Puritans, Nature was abstracted into all that was "Other," usually a place of wilderness and evil--a Place to be feared. Although, as Albanese points out, precedents exist in Christian history for the wilderness as a place of testing and purification. The new republicanism from the conservative American "revolution" fostered a "wilderness eucharist" mentality--holding Nature sacred as something to be ingested, thereby becomed (and overcomed).
Yet other turns no less revelant today are covered. Transcendentalism and its associated 'heathen' ambiguous reverance for Nature are documented, both in the paradoxical sense of Nature as the Ultimate and Nature as a illusion (or correspondence for the Ultimate. Both of these senses are inherited in contemporary Goddess worship and the different, but related phenomenon of New Age religion, while each of them individually leads Albanese to wilderness preservation ideology and Christian Science/Mind cure movements.
For Albanese, this protean concept contains its own multivalency, its own pluralism, and therefore tends to recede in influence and importance the more a particular offshoot institutionalizes and fossilizes. It is a voice more suited to a prophetic mindset than a priestly mindset, although that too could be possible, it seems. Excellent and challenging work to uncover and begin to document this counter-covenantal thread throughout American history and religion. Albanese freely admits to inventing the term herself--but she is correct in that using it as a frame of reference, for both elite and popular culture, for both empirical and cultural facts, tells us something very important about religion in the United States.
0 of 34 people found the following review helpful
good
19 Nov 1999
Format:Paperback
state living in, name of indians, etc.
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