Plenary Lecture for the American Academy of Religion-Western Region Annual Conference Featuring Tracy Fessenden
What explains the renewal of interest in the spiritual in America today? Answers often point to the fact that Americans self-identify as never before as spiritual-but-not-religious, or to a dispersal of the sacred into the secular realms of media, politics and economics. Dr. Fessenden reads the spiritual turn as belonging also to a ghostly history of American violence, pursued in the name of individual freedoms. The project of reconciling this hidden history and its unquiet witness with the quest for psychic health and wholeness, she suggests, contributes an animating strain in the history of American spirituality from the Transcendentalists to the War on Terror.
Dr. Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor of Comparative Mythologies on the Faculty of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
This presentation is free and open to the public and is part of The 2016 AAR Western Region Annual Conference. For more information, please go to www.aarwr.com/annual-meetings
The American Academy of Religion, Western Region (AAR/WR), would like to thank our generous hosts at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, Arizona, including the College of Humanities, the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, the English Department, the East Asian Studies Department, and the Institute for the Study of Religion and Culture (ISRC).