Pamela Klassen
A window onto how spirituality has functioned as a social category that bestows value on even "secular" objects, What Matters brilliantly demystifies spirituality without banishing spirits. With an embarrassment of riches at hand, including paranormal shadows in "real" science, turns to "tribalism" in psytrance festivals, and "spiritual" motivations within secular humanitarianism, these essays are an original foray into how spirituality is used to account for contemporary human experience, with piety and irony in play.
— Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity
— Pamela Klassen, University of Toronto
Robert Woothnow
Scholarly discussions of religion have been increasingly unsettled about the meaning of terms such as secularization, secularity, secularist, and for that matter religion. Rather than arguing about the definitions of each term, Bender and Taves move to transcend the religious-secular binary. They do so by examining how these terms and their meanings are used in a range of cultural sites. They fill a void by moving beyond a theoretical discussion of what the terms mean to providing empirical evidence of how the terms are currently used.
— Robert Woothnow, Princeton University
Robert Wuthnow
Scholarly discussions of religion have been increasingly unsettled about the meaning of terms such as secularization, secularity, secularist, and for that matter religion. Rather than arguing about the definitions of each term, Bender and Taves move to transcend the religious-secular binary. They do so by examining how these terms and their meanings are used in a range of cultural sites. They fill a void by moving beyond a theoretical discussion of what the terms mean to providing empirical evidence of how the terms are currently used.
— Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University
