Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today - Hardcover

Lattin, Don

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060093943 ISBN 13: 9780060093945

Publisher: HarperOne, 2003

Synopsis

The sixties transformed America's spiritual life. With his characteristic insight, wit, and dramatic reporting, renowned San Francisco Chronicle journalist Don Lattin takes the first comprehensive look at the spiritual legacy of that extraordinary time, viewed through the eyes of those who grew up at the center of some of the era's wildest experimentation.

The sixties brought an explosion of religious and spiritual exploration, unprecedented in its scope, fervor, and sheer creativity. Lattin reveals how and why New Age beliefs, feminist spirituality, Eastern religions, Tai Chi and yoga, spiritual healing, and other alternative practices have taken such firm root in American culture.

Lattin not only explores dramatic changes in the core American communities of faith -- Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish -- he also tells the stories of what has happened to the likes of the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, communes and ashrams, and to the children born into various spiritual communities. He shows how religious trends today, including the booming Christian rock movement, Buddhist punks, and contemporary Catholics wrestling with sexual ethics and church authority, have their roots in debates begun in the sixties.

In this stimulating odyssey through American spirituality -- then and now -- Don Lattin makes it clear why we need to understand sixties spirituality if we want to discover who we are today.

About this title

About the Author:

Don Lattin is one of the nation's leading journalists covering alternative and mainstream religious movements and figures in America. His work has appeared in dozens of U.S. magazines and newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, where he covered the religion beat for nearly two decades. Lattin has also worked as a consultant and commentator for Dateline, Primetime, Good Morning America, Nightline, Anderson Cooper 360, and PBS's Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. He is the author of Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge, and Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today, and is the coauthor of Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium.

From Publishers Weekly:

Next month, Yale will publish Mark Oppenheimer's Knocking on Heaven's Door, a study of how the 1960s changed the face of mainstream American religion. Similarly, in Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today, religion journalist Don Lattin traces the religious legacy of the turbulent decade. Unlike Oppenheimer, however, he focuses his attention most toward alternative movements: the Esalen Institute, the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church and the movement founded by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In one particularly engaging chapter, Lattin interviews the "dharma kids": second-generation American Buddhists like Dharma Punx author Noah Levine.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060093943
• ISBN 13: 9780060093945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288