Leigh Schmidt: Restless Souls

Summary
I just completed a superb work of entirely accessible scholarship by the renowned Princeton scholar of religion, Leigh Schmidt.  Restless Souls (2005) is Schmitdt's investigation into the origin and development of the persistently-nebulous term "spirituality" in so far as it appears in progressive American religious circles.   Focusing specifically on the period from 1830-1920 (roughly from the beginning of Emersonian transcendentalism to the demise of Greenacre in Eliot, Maine, with a few exceptions), Schmidt skillfully traces the various intersecting and overlapping streams of thought and practice within a number late nineteenth century movements: Transcendentalism, New Thought, Theosophy, Universalism, to name a few.  His broader project amounts to an attempt to distill the currents -and their main drivers - which contributed to the historical development of the term "spirituality."

In addition to producing a work of scholarship on the history of "spirituality" in America, Schmidt also has an axe to grind: he wants to offset the trend to tag the current "New Age" and "spiritual but not religious" crowd as self-serving, flaky and consumerist driven, among other pejoratives. Schmidt wastes no time, taking his gloves off and openly challenging the evangelical right within the first few pages of the introduction.  To protect contemporary liberal religiosity from the evangelical onslaught of the conservative right, he wishes to reclaim the validity and historical foundations of  American "spirituality" by tracing various liberal religious causes: universalism, religious pluralism, social causes such as abolition and women's suffrage, solitude, meditation, among others.

Schmidt divides the book into six chapters which each focus on one particular aspect of American spirituality: mysticism, solitude, universalism, meditation, freedom vs. self-surrender, and seeking.  Along the way, he profiles a number of key figures - from Emerson to Sarah Farmer and beyond - which play a role in the development of spirituality in America.  Emerson and mysticism, Thoreau and solitude, Higginson and Whitman for Universalism, Adler, Trine and Olcott for meditation, Farmer for the freedom vs. self-surrender debate and finally Jones, Smith and Heard in the chapter on seeking.  Naturally, these movements and figures overlap to a considerable degree, but Schmidt skillfully weaves the individual narratives into a coherent whole, a story of American spirituality.



Reflection
Naturally, I'm inclined to reflect on how this work of scholarship impacts my own investigation into the appropriation of Buddhist meditation into the western psychotheraputic setting.  It's not hard to see, in reading the book, that Schmidt focuses almost exclusively on spirituality in New England and the Northeast.  Whether this is because New Thought, Transcendentalism, Theosophy and the other movements share the Northeast as their epicenters or its a case of myopia on the part of Schmidt (who, not surprisingly, studied and teaches in the Northeast), or both, we can probably never know.  That said, the work clearly suggests that liberal American spirituality finds its origin in New England.

Relatedly, meditation (in its present incarnation) was initially incorporated into psychotherapy in New England (40m outside of Boston) in 1979.  My question is as follows: how much of a role does geography play in the development of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction specifically, and meditative interventions in general?  If a number of  liberal religious movements evolved out of New England stretching back to 1830's (and further), is it reasonable to assume that there is something about the Northeast that contributed to the development of Jon Kabat-Zinn's infusion of meditation into main stream medicine?

My first answer is that, Yes, of course, this is the case.  For the past 150 years or so (?) Harvard (and Cambridge in general) has been the liberal bastion of the nation - and indeed world.  Apparently, liberal ideas such as religious inclusivism and pluralism lend themselves well to adoption of Eastern thought and practice.  But is there anything else, besides a general progressive bent?  What about New England in particular, rather than just liberalism, contributes to the development of "spirituality" at the expense of "religion"?  Why Transcendentalism, New Thought, Universalism and MBSR instead of fundamentalism and all its friends?

More to the point: how has the religious geography of New England contributed to the development of MBSR?  Is there some connection between Emerson and Kabat-Zinn?  Between Thoreau and Kornfield?

Questions:
What is his method?  What is he doing?
How do you (Gary) seeing this work impact my own investigations?