Unsettled Minds

"This book examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century American believers rejected older, often evangelical, theological traditions and turned to scientific psychologies to help them formulate new ideas about mind and spirit and new practices for spiritual growth. Christopher G. White looks in particular at how a group of liberal Protestants, including William James and G. Stanley Hall, turned away from traditional Christian orthodoxies and built a revised religious identity based on new psychological motifs and therapies. Whereas the conventional wisdom about these religious positions and abetted secularization. White points out that they did not minimize or obliterate belief but aided and reshaped it in unexpected ways. Unsettled Minds is the first book to explain the dramatic rise of new spiritualities of the mind, spiritualities that, but the early twentieth century, were turning eagerly to scientific and clinical psychological studies to reimagine religion and the problems of religious uncertainty."--BOOK JACKET.