Product Description

Selling Spirituality shows how spirituality today functions as a powerful commodity in the global marketplace, promising to soothe away the ills of modern life whilst functioning as a silent form of economic, cultural and political restraint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #234621 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 194 pages

Review
'Selling Spirituality, is a genuine tract for our times. Carrette and King ruthlessly expose the cultural omnipotence of contemporary capitalism, the Moloch of our age.' - Professor Richard Roberts, Lancaster University

'Selling Spirituality is a long-needed, highly insightful critique of the prostitution of spirituality for personal profit and corporate gain. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King have provided a powerful indictment of the corporate exploitation of "the spiritual" in this hard-edged and illuminating book.' - Robert Thurman, Columbia University

'Selling Spirituality reveals how religious values and practices are being appropriated by big business to serve corporate interests such as consumerism and social conformism. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King expose how market forces are working to corporatise our deepest spiritual concerns. The questions they pose are essential for our future.' - David Loy, author of Religion and the Market

'This book is a long-needed, highly insightful critique of the spiritual supermarket, site of the prostitution of spirituality for personal profit and corporate gain. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King have provided a powerful indictment of the corporate exploitation of 'the spiritual,' using advertising and the media to distort the ethical and philosophical teachings of the world religious traditions to buttress their control of the minds of the people they wish to dominate as their loyal consumers. Serious students and teachers of spiritual thought or practice are well-advised to cultivate their self-critical alertness and hone their critical insight with the help of this hard-edged and illuminating book.' – Robert Thurman, Columbia University, USA

From the Back Cover
From Feng Shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, spirituality is big business. It promises to soothe away the angst of modern living and to offer an antidote to shallow materialism.
Selling Spirituality is a short, sharp, attack on this fallacy. It shows how spirituality has in fact become a powerful commodity in the global marketplace - a cultural addiction that reflects orthodox politics, curbs self-expression and colonizes Eastern beliefs.
Exposing how spirituality has today come to embody the privatization of religion in the modern West, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King reveal the people and brands who profit from this corporate hijack, and explore how spirituality can be reclaimed as a means of resistance to capitalism and its deceptions.

About the Author
Jeremy Carrette teaches Religious Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is author of Foucault and Religion (Routledge, 2000) and editor of Michel Foucault and Religious Experience (2003), and has also co-edited the Routledge Centenary Edition of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (2002). Richard King is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University. He is author of Orientalism and Religion (Routledge ,1999), Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (1999) and Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism (1995).

Customer Reviews

Selling Spirituality: Touching a Raw Nerve
This book touches a raw nerve. But it is the nerve that keeps the brain critical. It matters if the once noble meaning of "spirituality" as a self-transcending commitment to meaning, truth and value is increasinly taken over by commercialised forms of self-absorption. Corruptio optimi pessima, as the ancients would say. Sedating the the crazed consumerism of Western culture with "spirituality" is absurd. Forget about inter-faith dialogue or cultural criticism when the original "being more" of authentic spirituality has become the "having more" of obsessive consumerism.

This book points to the need of critical vigilance if our best words are going to meaning anything.

And, the point is?
These two authors seem to have a problem with anyone who sells a book about spirituality/religion, no matter if it is useful to people. They have a go at a few authors of these books, Deeprak Chopra and the Barefoot Doctor come in for a bit of stick but the book doesn't actually get to the point of why or how big business uses religion/sprituality, there are few, if any examples. Yes, there are people out there who do sell very dubious services in the spiritual marketplace but these are not discussed/investigated further. Very dissapointed in this book. Doesn't explain anything at all.