Russell Chandler's Understanding the New Age

Russell Chandler's Understanding the New Age is a breezy, generally good-hearted overview of the spiritual smorgasbord of the late 20th century. For the most part, Chandler treats the often eccentric religious manifestations of this era with respect and with the lightest of touches. Having to cover such a great deal of territory and material has hampered Chandler's ability to delve deeper into the content and concepts of these groups. However, he explores with greater focus and intensity, if not greater depth, the more mainstream-oriented of these and related entities, such as the humanistic psychology of thinkers like Maslow and Rogers, and the theories of Einstein and Heisenberg. The reader can be forgiven for concluding that Chandler, the religion writer for the Los Angeles Times for almost two decades, takes the New Age religions with a grain of salt, believing perhaps that the great bulk of them will fade away like grains of salt, leaving the world's more traditional religions largely unscathed.

However, even though Chandler writes of these new religions and sects with a light-heartedness, with less than thorough scientific scrutiny, he does not treat them with disrespect. Despite the generally brief and superficial treatment he gives them, he does report their fundamental beliefs and salient features, letting the leaders and/or believers speak for themselves, never mocking their words. This attitude should be appreciated, for certainly some of these sects are difficu

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the style is changing. Many are embracing a more open, yet elusive, movement that is abroad in our land. Collectively, this ideology is known as the New Age (9). The question is whether this openness is as widespread as Chandler suggests. Certainly those groups which emerged in the 1970s, such as Scientology, the Church Universal and Triumphant, and the Moonies of the Unification Church. Scientology has recently taken over the only national agency serving as watchdog over the activities of cults and their abuse of members. The Church Universal and Triumphant is said to have gathered an arsenal of weaponry in its massive territory in Montana. The Moonies recently held another mass wedding in which thousands of members married people they had not even previously met. Is such activity as harmless as Chandler seems to suggest in his analysis of New Age groups? One wonders what Chandler might have to say about the Heaven's Gate cult in Sand Diego, its UFO theories, brainwashing practices, and eventual mass suicide. Does such a group represent the greater openness of the New Age? The suggestion here is that perhaps Chandler takes an overly accepting stance toward these groups, some of which call for far more attention than detached be

Category: Philosophy - R