the history of health, wellness and spirituality...with tips for the 21st C
Americans are fascinated by the idea of polygamy, in the Orientalism of the harem (which only the wealthy can and could afford to practice), or the former practices of American Mormonism. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a Mormon Harvard historian, presents a complicated picture of Mormonism in …
Popular religious life in New England, unlike Europe, had no Christmas, cathedrals, abbeys, liturgies, wedding ales, or anything done away with by the Protestant Reformation of 1517. Yet the settlers did come with “folk” beliefs, sometimes older than Christianity, that had not been specifically …
Ann Braude. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 2001. Anne Braude’s 1989 Religious Studies classic Radical Spirits was one of the first texts to discuss how religion empowered women politically through the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of Spiritualism, a …
April R. Haynes. Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. When Sylvester Graham offered the same sex advice to women as men—no masturbation, which would cause insanity, disease, and death, and no sexual excess …
Robert C. Fuller. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Robert Fuller writes a history of 19th-century mental healing traditions that connects European Mesmerism to the development of distinctly American religious-psychological traditions such as Christian Science and New Thought. Fuller …
Another! And finally we are moving into health books. Susan E. Cayleff. Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Washed and Be Healed is a fantastic look at the history of women’s experiences of the mid-nineteenth century …
Like last time, because it’s relevant to this Gymnosophist project, I’m sharing a review I wrote that relates to our lineage here (or one of them)—a piece of the history of spirituality in the U.S., this time from a scholar of English. It is something …
Hello, everyone. I abandoned you to my books and teaching for awhile, and for that apologies. I’m studying for exams and it’s just been impossible to post regularly even about fun stuff because frankly, I cannot bear to look at a screen any more than …
Wim Hof: “I am into mental healthcare. But we will shoot right straight in. Change the world. Cause, you know, I’m reaching about a hundred million people already [AnnaLynne: “Gasp”] but it’s going to be billions [AnnaLynne: clapping, yells “YES!“] and when we change billions of …
time. This just popped into my radar: So how about a TV show where you can sit back and egg on celebrities as Wim Hof runs them through an ice-cold gauntlet? Enter Wim Hof’s Superstar Survival. In this brand new BBC series, Wim guides a …