Courtney Bender

An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time. Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time. Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

American spirituality - meaning astrology, yoga, and the huge number of other alternative strains of religion pursued by individuals outside of traditional organizations - is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. Aromatherapy, crystals, and an interest in one's aura are supposedly relics of the narcissism and iconoclasm of the 1960s. But, as "The New Metaphysicals" reveals, contemporary American spirituality has deep historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements: it turns out the New Age is getting on in years. To explore the world of contemporary spiritual practitioners, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts - a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritualist beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners as well as from the many scholars who have studied it. Perceptive, persuasive, and at times gently humorous, "The New Metaphysicals" will greatly broaden our understanding of religion in America.

American spirituality - meaning astrology, yoga, and the huge number of other alternative strains of religion pursued by individuals outside of traditional organizations - is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. Aromatherapy, crystals, and an interest in one's aura are supposedly relics of the narcissism and iconoclasm of the 1960s. But, as "The New Metaphysicals" reveals, contemporary American spirituality has deep historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements: it turns out the New Age is getting on in years. To explore the world of contemporary spiritual practitioners, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts - a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritualist beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners as well as from the many scholars who have studied it. Perceptive, persuasive, and at times gently humorous, "The New Metaphysicals" will greatly broaden our understanding of religion in America.

How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? How do our daily encounters with people who hold different religious beliefs shape the way we understand our own moral and spiritual selves? In Heaven's Kitchen, Courtney Bender takes a highly original approach to answering these questions. For more than a year she worked in New York City as a volunteer for a nonprofit, nonreligious organization called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Paying close attention to what was said and not said, Bender traces how the volunteers gave voice to their moral positions and religious values. She also examines how they invested their conversations, and mundane activities such as cooking, with personal meaning that in turn affected how they saw their own spiritual lives. Filled with vibrant storytelling and rich theoretical insights, Heaven's Kitchen shows faith as a living practice, reshaping our understanding of the role of religion in contemporary American life.

Filled with vivid storytelling and rich theoretical insights, "Heaven's Kitchen" shows faith as a living practice, reshaping our understanding of the role of religion in contemporary American life.