Religion,cultural studies and New Age sacralization of everyday life

Abstract

Through an interpretation of New Age spirituality, this article is concerned with how cultural studies – as a discipline that emerged in the shadow of secularization theory – can be involved in the reappraisal of religion. At once part consumer culture and part counterculture, the New Age is something of a conundrum that raises alluring questions about social and cultural change. In the name of re-enchantment and taking back control of one’s life through inner spiritual power, it appears to be aimed precisely at those forces of social rationalization that are seen to engender secularization. The piece suggests that such emergent religious movements not only challenge us to rethink the frameworks through which religion has been conceptualized, but that they provide multiple possibilities for the examination of the sacred in light of cultural studies’ disciplinary concerns with contemporary sociocultural dynamics, in particular as they are experienced within the ambit of everyday life.