Kirjahaku

This book documents the wide range of contemporary communes and other intentional communities providing sanctuaries for like-minded people to pursue cooperative alternatives to media-stoked consumerism and the relentless tempo of change that characterizes mainstream life in 21st-century America and Europe.Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities explores the many new types of communal living being tried in America and Europe today. A growing number of people disenchanted with the pressures and demands of mainstream lifestyles are drawn by the nostalgic appeal of traditional, mostly agrarian and artisanal, lifestyles as practiced in residential communities where liminal rituals of membership serve to validate pacts to live and work together in cooperative social and economic relations. Manzella focuses on the ways in which today's most innovative and controversial ecovillages diverge from the hippie communes of yesteryear's counterculture and from older communal forms such as kibbutzim and arts and crafts colonies, and how today's nonsectarian spiritual and volunteer service communities differ from traditional religious communes and ashrams. He reports his field investigations of a whole new generation of communal living experiments, such as residential land trusts, survivalist retreats, urban cohousing, green housing cooperatives, student co-ops, and New Age organic agrarian communes.

Seeking Transcendence examines the various paths taken by those who have detached themselves from their traditional, institutional religious roots but are seeking non-traditional paths to spiritual experiences. Called the “nones” or "non-affiliated" in popular mass media, these include a significant number of Western folks who maintain a belief in God or at least consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”.Each chapter of the book explores these trends with a specific theme, as well as a case study based on the author’s ethnographic observation of alternative spiritual communities and practices in North America and Western Europe.Ultimately, this book shows how contemporary alternatives to traditional institutional religion appeal to nones, presenting the relevance of new religious movements and more secular spiritual paths to transcendence.

Seeking Transcendence examines the various paths taken by those who have detached themselves from their traditional, institutional religious roots but are seeking non-traditional paths to spiritual experiences. Called the “nones” or "non-affiliated" in popular mass media, these include a significant number of Western folks who maintain a belief in God or at least consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”.Each chapter of the book explores these trends with a specific theme, as well as a case study based on the author’s ethnographic observation of alternative spiritual communities and practices in North America and Western Europe.Ultimately, this book shows how contemporary alternatives to traditional institutional religion appeal to nones, presenting the relevance of new religious movements and more secular spiritual paths to transcendence.