Bloomsbury Academic Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies)

This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents. Review Conquered is beautifully produced and written with flair and great scholarly acumen. Parker teaches medieval English literature at the University of Oxford and she dedicates her book to her students. Because of the pandemic these young people, she points out, like the young people in her book, have had to cope with upheaval, loss and a sudden change in the expected course of their lives. They have faced it with courage and determination, but, she writes, “it is no doubt an experience that will remain with them”. --The Sunday Times, John CareyIn her superbly adroit new history, Eleanor Parker examines how memories of Edgar and his like – the generation that straddled the Conquest – survived, or were melded to meet the needs of the time…. It is much to the credit of Parker’s sensitivity as a scholar that, almost 1,000 years later, she has been able to resurrect, often from silence, the pathos of those decades and the plight of those who endured them. --The Spectator, Alex BurghartThis outstanding, beautifully written history follows the young Anglo-Saxons whose lives were shattered by the Norman conquest. --The Times, Best Books of 2022, Andrew Holgate and Robbie Millen About the Author Ioannis Gaitandis is Assistant Professor at Chiba University, Japan.