3HO and Sikh Dharma International — The Way of the White Turban — An ethnographic introduction to 3HO (Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization) and Sikh Dharma International — the intertwined American spiritual movements founded by Yogi Bhajan (Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji, 1929–2004) that brought Kundalini yoga and Sikh religious practice to the Western counterculture, producing a distinctive community of white-turbaned American Sikhs, a global yoga teacher-training empire, and a multimillion-dollar natural products industry — alongside a legacy of serious abuse allegations that emerged after the founder's death.
A Course in Miracles — The Voice of the Inner Teacher — An ethnographic introduction to A Course in Miracles — the 1,200-page channeled spiritual teaching dictated to Columbia University psychologist Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972, which has sold millions of copies and become one of the most influential texts in the New Age and spiritual-but-not-religious movements.
American Spiritualism — The Way of Continuous Life — An ethnographic introduction to American Spiritualism — the nineteenth-century religious movement, founded on the claim that the dead can speak to the living, that became the first mass democratic spirituality in American history, gave birth to Espiritismo and Theosophy, and endures today in the channeling movement, the medium show, and every tradition that insists death is not the final word.
AMORC — The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis — An ethnographic introduction to AMORC (Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) — the Rosicrucian fraternal order founded by Harvey Spencer Lewis in 1915, which operates from its Egyptian-styled campus in San Jose, California, and has taught a graded correspondence curriculum of mystical philosophy, meditation, and practical metaphysics to hundreds of thousands of seekers worldwide.
Anthroposophy — The Way of Spiritual Science — An ethnographic introduction to Anthroposophy — Rudolf Steiner's system of 'spiritual science,' born from the Theosophical Society and the German idealist tradition, which has produced Waldorf education (1,200 schools worldwide), biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophic medicine, the Camphill communities, eurythmy, and a distinctive architecture — all flowing from one Austrian philosopher's conviction that the spiritual world is as precisely knowable as the physical, and that every domain of practical life can be transformed by that knowledge.
Association for Research and Enlightenment — The Edgar Cayce Legacy — An ethnographic introduction to the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) — the organization founded in 1931 to preserve and study the work of Edgar Cayce, the American psychic whose 14,306 trance readings on health, reincarnation, Atlantis, and spiritual development made him the most documented clairvoyant in history and one of the foundational figures of the New Age movement.
Barquinha — An ethnographic introduction to the Barquinha — the Little Boat — the smallest and most mysterious of Brazil's three ayahuasca religions, founded in 1945 near Rio Branco, Acre, by former sailor and converted alcoholic Daniel Pereira de Mattos (Frei Daniel), a disciple of Santo Daime's Mestre Irineu. Of the three, Barquinha is the most Catholic in form and the most Afro-Brazilian in practice, the most syncretic and the least studied, and the only one in which the spirits are not merely glimpsed but arrive.
Brotherhood of Christ Church — An ethnographic introduction to the Brotherhood of Christ Church — the Iowa Essenes — a small intentional community founded in 1988 near Davis City, Iowa, by former Reorganized Latter Day Saint minister Ron Livingston. One of the most distinctive expressions of the Aquarian impulse in the American heartland: an Essene-identified Christian commune living without electricity or running water in the shadow of the TM movement, with its own scriptural revelation and a forty-year record of survival.
Builders of the Adytum — The Way of the Western Mysteries — An ethnographic introduction to Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.): the Western mystery school founded in 1922 by Paul Foster Case (1884–1954), dedicated to the study and practice of the Qabalah, the Tarot, and the Western esoteric tradition. B.O.T.A. teaches that the Tarot is not a fortune-telling device but a pictorial textbook of ageless wisdom, that the Qabalah's Tree of Life is the master diagram of consciousness, and that the Western mystery tradition — running from Egypt through Greece, through Jewish mysticism, through the Rosicrucian and Hermetic brotherhoods — constitutes a coherent science of spiritual development. Operating as a correspondence school from its Los Angeles headquarters, B.O.T.A. has maintained a quiet, disciplined presence in the landscape of American esotericism for over a century.
Candomblé — An ethnographic introduction to Candomblé — the Afro-Brazilian religion that emerged from the crucible of Atlantic slavery, survived three centuries of persecution through the fierce custodianship of Black women, and preserved one of the richest spiritual cosmologies in the Americas.
Chaos Magick — The Way of the Freed Sorcerer — An ethnographic introduction to chaos magick — the post-modern magical tradition founded in late-1970s England by Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, which rejected the elaborate hierarchies and dogmatic belief systems of traditional Western occultism in favour of a radical pragmatism that holds nothing sacred except results — a tradition whose core technique, the sigil, and whose core principle, 'nothing is true, everything is permitted,' have reshaped the landscape of contemporary magical practice.
Christian Science — Primitive Christianity Restored — An ethnographic introduction to Christian Science — the religion founded in 1875 by Mary Baker Eddy on the conviction that Jesus's healings were not miracles of exception but demonstrations of divine law, that matter is ultimately unreal, and that sickness, sin, and death are errors of mortal mind correctable through prayer; the most metaphysically radical of the American mind-cure traditions and the first major American-born denomination led by a woman.
Church of All Worlds — The Way of Water Sharing — An ethnographic introduction to the Church of All Worlds (CAW) — the American neo-pagan religious organization founded in 1962 by Tim Zell (later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, b. 1942), directly inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land — the first religion in history to be consciously founded on a work of fiction, built around the water-sharing sacrament, the greeting 'Thou art God,' the theology of immanent divinity, the publication Green Egg (one of the most influential pagan magazines of the twentieth century), and a living unicorn.
Church Universal and Triumphant — The Summit Lighthouse — An ethnographic introduction to Church Universal and Triumphant and The Summit Lighthouse — the Ascended Master movement founded by Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, which carried the Ballard legacy to its most ambitious organizational expression, built a self-contained religious community near Yellowstone, was shattered by a failed prophecy and a shelter crisis, and persists in diminished form as the most fully documented case study of charismatic authority in the American metaphysical tradition.
Contemporary Paganism — The Old Religion Reborn — An ethnographic introduction to contemporary paganism — the modern religious movement that arose in twentieth-century Britain and America, drawing on pre-Christian European traditions, nature worship, and ceremonial magic, encompassing Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, and Goddess spirituality — arguably the most significant grassroots reenchantment of the Western world since the Romantic period.
Curanderismo — The Way of the Healer — An ethnographic introduction to curanderismo — the syncretic folk-healing tradition of Mexico and the US-Mexico borderlands, weaving together Mesoamerican medicine, Spanish Catholic devotion, and African healing knowledge into a living system that addresses illness of the body, spirit, and social world.
Diné Religion — The Way of Hózhó — An ethnographic introduction to the religion of the Diné (Navajo) people — the theology of hózhó as beauty, harmony, and sacred order; the emergence through the underworlds; the Holy People and Changing Woman; the Four Sacred Mountains that define the homeland; and the elaborate chantway tradition through which hataalii singers restore the world to balance.
Eckankar — The Religion of the Light and Sound of God — An ethnographic introduction to Eckankar — the American religion founded by Paul Twitchell in 1965, which translated the Indian Sant Mat tradition of soul travel through inner planes of light and sound into a distinctly American spiritual movement, and which has persisted through sustained controversy over its founder's methods and sources.
Espiritismo Kardecista — An ethnographic introduction to Espiritismo Kardecista — the reincarnationist, mediumistic, and charitable religion codified in nineteenth-century France by Allan Kardec and transformed by Brazil into one of the largest and most distinctively national religious movements in the modern world.
Goddess Spirituality — The Way of the Sacred Feminine — An ethnographic introduction to Goddess spirituality — the contemporary spiritual movement that emerged from the intersection of feminism, archaeology, and paganism in the 1970s, centered on worship of the divine as female, encompassing Dianic Wicca, the Reclaiming tradition, the Goddess Temple movement, and a broad ecology of practitioners who understand the sacred as primarily or exclusively feminine — one of the most theologically radical and politically charged spiritual movements of the modern West.
Haitian Vodou — An ethnographic introduction to Haitian Vodou — the Afro-Caribbean religion that emerged from West African traditions in the crucible of slavery, gave spiritual force to the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and became one of the most globally significant and most globally misrepresented living traditions of the modern world.
Haudenosaunee — The Longhouse Way — An ethnographic introduction to the religion of the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse) — the Sky Woman creation narrative, the Great Law of Peace, the Thanksgiving Address as daily covenant with creation, the ceremonial calendar and medicine societies, and the revitalization movement of Handsome Lake, whose Code of Gaiwiio is still recited in full at Tonawanda every year.
Hoodoo — The Way of the Root Doctor — An ethnographic introduction to Hoodoo — the African-American folk spiritual tradition also known as conjure, rootwork, and laying tricks, rooted in the practices of enslaved West and Central Africans in the American South, blended with Native American herbalism and European folk magic, practiced continuously for over three centuries, and now experiencing a modern revival as both spiritual practice and cultural reclamation.
I AM Activity — The Saint Germain Foundation — An ethnographic introduction to the I AM Activity and the Saint Germain Foundation — the American metaphysical movement founded by Guy and Edna Ballard in the 1930s, which bridged Victorian Theosophy and the late twentieth-century New Age, introduced the Violet Flame and the practice of decreeing, survived a landmark Supreme Court case on religious freedom, and seeded the movements that would carry Ascended Master teachings into the modern world.
Jehovah's Witnesses — The Way of the Kingdom — An ethnographic introduction to the Jehovah's Witnesses — the American millenarian movement born from one man's refusal to believe in hellfire, which became one of the most disciplined, controversial, and legally consequential religious organizations on earth, with 8.7 million active members proclaiming Jehovah's Kingdom from door to door across 240 countries.
Lakota Religion — The Way of the Sacred Hoop — An ethnographic introduction to the religion of the Lakota people — the theology of Wakan Tanka the Great Mystery, the gift of the sacred pipe, the seven sacred rites, the vision of the flowering tree at the center of all nations, and the survival of a living tradition through colonization, massacre, and forced assimilation.
Lucumí — La Regla de Ocha — An ethnographic introduction to Lucumí — La Regla de Ocha — the Cuban expression of Yoruba orixá religion that survived the Middle Passage, slavery, colonial suppression, and Marxist atheism to become one of the most dynamic religious movements of the twentieth-century Americas.
Modern Druidry — The Way of the Awen — An ethnographic introduction to modern Druidry — the nature-mystical spiritual tradition that traces its organizational roots to eighteenth-century fraternal orders and Iolo Morganwg's literary forgeries, was reborn through Ross Nichols and Philip Carr-Gomm's Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and Isaac Bonewits's Ár nDraíocht Féin, and now constitutes a living global movement of some hundred thousand practitioners organized around the three grades of Bard, Ovate, and Druid, the pursuit of Awen (poetic inspiration), and the sacredness of the living earth.
Modern Non-Duality — The Way of What You Already Are — An ethnographic introduction to the modern non-duality movement — the decentralized spiritual phenomenon rooted in Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj that exploded into the West through Papaji's Lucknow satsang in the 1990s and now encompasses hundreds of teachers, millions of YouTube views, and an ongoing global conversation about the nature of consciousness, the illusion of the separate self, and the possibility that what you are seeking is what you already are.
New Thought — The Way of the Positive Mind — An ethnographic introduction to New Thought — the nineteenth-century American metaphysical movement that taught thought shapes reality, that God is infinite mind available to every person, and that health, harmony, and prosperity are the natural condition of being; the direct ancestor of Unity, Religious Science, the self-help industry, the prosperity gospel, and the contemporary language of manifestation.
Pentecostalism — The Fire Falls — An ethnographic introduction to Pentecostalism — the charismatic Christian movement born from the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in Los Angeles, centered on the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues, divine healing, and direct encounter with the supernatural; now encompassing over 600 million adherents worldwide across Classical Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Neo-Charismatic streams, and constituting the fastest-growing wing of global Christianity.
Rastafari — An ethnographic introduction to Rastafari — the Jamaican religious movement born from the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie I, whose theology of Black liberation, divine immanence, and repatriation to Africa spread across the world on the back of reggae music.
Religious Science — The Practical Infinite — An ethnographic introduction to Religious Science — the American philosophical-spiritual movement founded by Ernest Holmes in Los Angeles in 1926, built on the premise that an Infinite Intelligence underlies all existence and that affirmative prayer, practiced with precision and conviction, can align the individual with that Intelligence to produce healing, abundance, and freedom; the most intellectually systematic expression of the New Thought lineage, now continuing through Centers for Spiritual Living.
Santo Daime — An ethnographic introduction to Santo Daime, the syncretic Christian-Amazonian religion founded in the 1930s by Raimundo Irineu Serra in the Brazilian state of Acre — the Forest Doctrine, which centers on the sacramental brew Daime (ayahuasca), a body of revealed hymns, and a decolonial synthesis of folk Catholicism, Afro-Brazilian tradition, and indigenous Amazonian spirituality.
Scientology — The Bridge to Total Freedom — An ethnographic introduction to Scientology — the American religion founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, built on a theory of the mind called Dianetics and a practice called auditing, which grew from a 1950 bestseller into one of the most controversial, litigious, and financially powerful religious organizations in the world, claiming millions of adherents but counting, by independent estimates, fewer than 50,000 active members.
Seventh-day Adventism — The Advent Hope — An ethnographic introduction to the Seventh-day Adventist Church — the American apocalyptic movement born from the Great Disappointment of 1844, shaped by the prophetic visions of Ellen G. White, and grown into a global institution of 22 million members operating the largest Protestant educational system on earth, one of the world's most extensive healthcare networks, and a health philosophy that has made its communities among the longest-lived populations ever studied.
Subud — The Way of the Latihan — An ethnographic introduction to Subud — the spiritual movement founded by Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo (Bapak) in 1920s Java, which centers on the practice of the latihan kejiwaan, a spontaneous surrender to the power of God that produces involuntary movements, sounds, and inner experiences, and which spread to the West through the Gurdjieff network in 1957.
Swedenborgianism — The New Church — An ethnographic introduction to Swedenborgianism and the New Church: the religious tradition founded on the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), the Swedish polymath and mystic who, in the second half of his life, claimed to travel regularly in the spiritual world and converse with angels. Swedenborg's influence on the development of Western esotericism, American metaphysical religion, and the Romantic imagination is disproportionate to the small size of the organised churches that bear his name. His theology — that God is one, that the spiritual world is more real than the material, that every natural thing corresponds to a spiritual reality, and that the Second Coming has already occurred as a mental event — shaped William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Balzac, Baudelaire, the New Thought movement, Spiritualism, and the entire American metaphysical tradition.
The Aetherius Society — The Way of the Cosmic Masters — An ethnographic introduction to the Aetherius Society — the UFO-contactee spiritual organization founded in 1955 by George King, a London yoga practitioner who claimed telepathic contact with Cosmic Masters from Venus and other planets, and which has since developed into one of the most practice-oriented new religious movements in the Western world, distinguished by its elaborate spiritual operations (Operation Starlight, Operation Prayer Power, Operation Sunbeam), its theology blending Theosophy, raja yoga, and Christian esotericism with extraterrestrial cosmology, and its survival as an active global community nearly three decades after its founder's death.
The Arcane School — The Way of the New Age — An ethnographic introduction to the Arcane School: the esoteric training program founded in 1923 by Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949), administered by the Lucis Trust, and rooted in the claim that Bailey received twenty-five volumes of teaching by telepathic dictation from a Tibetan master known as Djwhal Khul. The Arcane School is the institutional heart of the tradition that literally coined the term 'the New Age' — Bailey's vision of the Aquarian dispensation, the return of the Christ as a universal spiritual presence, and the emergence of a planetary civilisation guided by a Hierarchy of ascended masters. Its influence on the global New Age movement is foundational and pervasive, yet the School itself remains small, sober, and deliberately un-charismatic.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — The Restoration — An ethnographic introduction to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) — the American restorationist tradition founded by Joseph Smith Jr. in 1830, which produced new scripture, a new priesthood, a new temple tradition, and the most successful new religion born on American soil, while also generating some of the most painful controversies in American religious history.
The Entheogenic Tradition — The Way of the Sacred Medicine — An ethnographic introduction to the entheogenic tradition — the American and global spiritual movement that holds psychedelic substances to be sacraments capable of inducing genuine mystical experience, from Aldous Huxley's mescaline revelation in 1953 through Timothy Leary's evangelism, the underground decades, Stanislav Grof's cartography of consciousness, and the twenty-first-century psychedelic renaissance at Johns Hopkins and beyond — a tradition distinct from the specific plant-medicine churches (Santo Daime, UDV, the Native American Church) but drawing from and feeding into all of them.
The Fourth Way — The Work — A profile of the Fourth Way tradition founded by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff — a teaching that humans are asleep and can awaken through conscious labor, sacred dance, and group work, transmitted from a Greek-Armenian mystic through an unbroken chain of practitioners from 1912 to the present.
The Holy Piby — The foundational scripture of the Afro Athlican Constructive Church, written by Robert Athlyi Rogers of Anguilla in 1924 — the first proto-Rastafarian text to identify Marcus Garvey as a divine apostle and to frame the liberation of Ethiopia's African diaspora as the central act of the twentieth century.
The Human Potential Movement — The Way of Becoming — An ethnographic introduction to the Human Potential Movement and the Esalen Institute — the mid-twentieth-century American spiritual and psychological revolution that brought Eastern contemplative practice, Western humanistic psychology, somatic therapy, and psychedelic research together at a hot springs in Big Sur, California, and seeded the vocabulary, the practices, and the institutional forms that the world would call the New Age.
The Integral Movement — The Way of Everything — A profile of the Integral Movement — the philosophical and spiritual community that grew from Ken Wilber's attempt to build a map of everything: all quadrants of experience, all levels of development, all lines of intelligence, all states of consciousness, all types of personality. Born from one man's reading in a Lincoln, Nebraska apartment in the 1970s, the movement became the most ambitious synthetic framework in contemporary Western spirituality — and the most controversial.
The Jesus Movement — The Way of the Street Gospel — An ethnographic introduction to the Jesus Movement — the late 1960s and early 1970s American phenomenon in which countercultural young people, many of them former hippies, drug users, and Vietnam-era dropouts, converted to evangelical Christianity and transformed American worship culture forever, birthing Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard Movement, Contemporary Christian Music, and the megachurch as an institution — the most consequential encounter between the American counterculture and organized religion.
The Moorish Science Temple — The Way of the Asiatic — An ethnographic introduction to the Moorish Science Temple of America: the religious movement founded in 1913 by Noble Drew Ali (Timothy Drew, 1886–1929), the first large-scale African American religious movement to claim an Islamic identity and to assert that Black Americans are not Negroes but Asiatics — Moorish descendants of the ancient Moabites. The Moorish Science Temple's theology fused elements of Islam, Freemasonry, Theosophy, Gnosticism, and Black nationalism into a distinctive spiritual identity that directly influenced the Nation of Islam, the Five Percent Nation, and the broader tradition of African American alternative religion.
The Nation of Islam — The Way of the Lost-Found — An ethnographic introduction to the Nation of Islam — the African American religious and political movement founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930 in Detroit, developed by Elijah Muhammad into a disciplined organization of Black self-determination, and reshaped after Elijah Muhammad's death into two lineages: Warith Deen Mohammed's orthodox Sunni turn and Louis Farrakhan's reconstituted Nation; the tradition that gave the world Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and the most powerful theology of Black self-sovereignty in American history.
The Native American Church — The Peyote Way — An ethnographic introduction to the Native American Church — the largest pan-Indian religious movement in North America, combining traditional Indigenous ceremony with Christian elements around the sacramental use of peyote, with roots stretching back millennia and a formal institutional history beginning in 1918.
The New Age Movement — The Way of the Aquarian Dawn — An ethnographic introduction to the New Age movement — the vast, decentralized spiritual phenomenon that emerged from the convergence of Theosophy, New Thought, the human potential movement, the 1960s counterculture, and Eastern mysticism to become the defining religious sensibility of late-twentieth-century America — encompassing channeling, crystal healing, astrology, holistic health, past-life regression, and the conviction that humanity stands at the threshold of a new era of consciousness, the Aquarian Age.
The Promised Key — Proto-Rastafarian tract by Leonard Percival Howell (G.G. Maragh), published c. 1935 in Jamaica. One of the foundational documents of the early Rastafari movement, identifying Emperor Haile Selassie I as King Alpha and Earth's Rightful Ruler.
The Raëlian Movement — The Way of the Infinite — An ethnographic introduction to the Raëlian Movement — the UFO religion founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon (Raël, b. 1946) after a claimed encounter with extraterrestrial beings called the Elohim, who revealed that all life on Earth was scientifically created by their civilization — producing a global community of approximately 100,000 members across 100+ countries, organized around the project of building an embassy to welcome the Elohim's return, and distinguished by an unusually permissive sexual ethic, the Clonaid human cloning controversy, and a theology that replaces God with advanced extraterrestrial science.
The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy — The 1926 proto-Rastafarian text of Fitz Balintine Pettersburg — a visionary Jamaican preacher who proclaimed the coming of a Black divine sovereignty and whose work directly influenced Leonard Howell, the First Rasta.
The Shakers — Hands to Work, Hearts to God — An ethnographic introduction to the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing — the American religious community known as the Shakers, founded by Ann Lee in 1774, practicing celibacy, communal ownership, gender equality, and the theology of a dual-gendered God; now reduced to three members at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, and among the most theologically and aesthetically significant traditions in American religious history.
The Society of Friends — The Way of the Inner Light — An ethnographic introduction to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) — the radical English dissenting tradition founded by George Fox in the 1640s, which rejected all clergy, creed, and sacrament in favor of direct encounter with the divine Light within, and which has sustained nearly four centuries of silent worship, radical egalitarianism, and prophetic witness.
The Urantia Foundation — The Fifth Epochal Revelation — An ethnographic introduction to the Urantia movement — the spiritual community that formed around The Urantia Book (1955), a 2,097-page text attributed to celestial beings and channeled through a sleeping subject in Chicago, which presents an enormously detailed cosmology of the universe, a history of Earth from its geological formation to the twentieth century, and a 774-page life of Jesus that is among the most extraordinary religious documents of the modern era.
The Word of Faith Movement — The Way of the Spoken Word — An ethnographic introduction to the Word of Faith movement — the American religious phenomenon that carried New Thought's metaphysical principle of mental causation into the heart of evangelical Christianity through the teachings of E.W. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagin, and their successors, producing the prosperity gospel, the practice of positive confession, and a global movement now reaching hundreds of millions of adherents from Houston to Lagos to São Paulo.
Thelema — The Way of the True Will — An ethnographic introduction to Thelema — the religious and magical system founded by Aleister Crowley following his reception of The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904, which teaches that every human being possesses a unique True Will and that the discovery and performance of this Will is the sole purpose of existence — a tradition that has shaped modern occultism more profoundly than any other and whose institutional vehicle, the Ordo Templi Orientis, continues to practice worldwide.
Theosophy — The Ancient Wisdom — An ethnographic introduction to Theosophy — the esoteric religious movement founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, which synthesized Western occultism, Hindu philosophy, and Buddhist cosmology into a system of hidden wisdom, and whose influence on the modern spiritual imagination has been so pervasive that most of its ideas now circulate without attribution.
Umbanda — An ethnographic introduction to Umbanda — the Afro-Brazilian religion of spirit mediumship that emerged from the collision of African tradition, Kardecist Spiritism, and the Catholic-indigenous world of twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, carrying millions through the century and remaining one of the most widely practiced religions in the Americas.
Uniao do Vegetal — An ethnographic introduction to the União do Vegetal (UDV) — the Brazilian Christian Spiritist religion founded in 1961 by José Gabriel da Costa (Mestre Gabriel) in the Amazon rainforest, whose sacramental use of Hoasca (ayahuasca) and Solomonic-Amazonian cosmology produced both a 24,000-member global institution and a landmark United States Supreme Court ruling on religious freedom.
Unitarian Universalism — The Free Faith — An ethnographic introduction to Unitarian Universalism — the American denomination born from the merger of two heretical traditions, Unitarianism and Universalism, which resolved the perennial hypothesis into institutional form and became the church where Emerson's children could finally sit down.
Unity — The Practical Way — An ethnographic introduction to Unity — the American metaphysical Christian movement founded in 1889 by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City, built on affirmative prayer, the metaphysical interpretation of scripture, and the conviction that God is present in every person as the divine 'I AM'; the most institutionally durable expression of the New Thought lineage and the home of Silent Unity's 130-year continuous prayer ministry.
Western Sufism — The Way of the Heart in Exile — An ethnographic introduction to Western Sufism — the transplantation and transformation of Islamic mystical tradition in Europe and America, from Hazrat Inayat Khan's Universal Sufism to the Mevlevi whirling dervishes, Samuel Lewis's Dances of Universal Peace, Idries Shah's literary Sufism, and the contemporary landscape of Sufi orders, study circles, and spiritual communities in the West; a tradition that has become one of the most significant bridges between Eastern mysticism and Western spiritual seeking.