- English
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About this book
This book explores the historical and social dynamics of Spiritualism - a religious movement associated in the popular imagination with nineteenth-century parlour séances and ghost photography. It continues to be practised actively today in Australia, the UK, and USA. The authors draw on their deep fieldwork, interviews, and archival research to analyse Spiritualism's resilience and the enduring popular appeal of mediumship.There are three key contributions of the book: the first is that the scholarly study of "belief" should be rehabilitated. The authors propose a model of belief as a dialogue between claims to truth and commitments to institutions supporting those claims. The second is women's agency in Spiritualism. From the movement's beginnings, strong female leaders have decisively shaped its religious and political profile. The third is the need to analyse Australian Spiritualism as a distinct variant of a transnational Anglophone family of ritual practice.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- List of maps and illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- A note on terminology and transcriptions
- 1 The Age of Aquarius
- 2 An ever-widening circle of interest
- 3 The Victorian Spiritualists’ Union and the changing face of twentieth-century Australia
- 4 The service
- 5 Healing and perfection
- 6 Metaphysical therapy
- 7 The theater for belief
- 8 A little outpost
- 9 Typically Spiritualist
- 10 Race and ethnicity in the spirit world
- 11 How Australian is Australian Spiritualism?
- Afterword: Here and hereafter
- Appendix A: Emma Hardinge Britten in Australia, 1878–1879
- Appendix B: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Wanderings of a Spiritualist: Missionary work in Australia, 1920–1921
- Appendix C: Transcript of the Canberra Spiritualist Association service of August 6, 2017
- References
- Index