Rediscovering the Sacred: Spirituality in America

by Phyllis Tickle

More Americans than ever are reading spiritual books. What are they looking for? What have they found? What does it all mean?
Phyllis Tickle, an authority on religion in America, explores the phenomenon from historical, sociological, and literary perspectives. She examines our hunger for sacred meaning, synthesizes key elements of an evolving spirituality, and reveals Christianity to be a treasure chest for seekers in the future.

Genres: Religion

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 1995

About the author

Phyllis Natalie Tickle was an American author and lecturer whose work focuses on spirituality and religion issues. After serving as a teacher, professor, and academic dean, Tickle entered the publishing industry, serving as the founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, before then becoming a popular writer. She is well known as a leading voice in the emergence church movement. She is perhaps best known for The Divine Hours series of books, published by Doubleday Press, and her book The Great Emergence- How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Tickle was a member of the Episcopal Church, where she was licensed as both a lector and a lay eucharistic minister. She has been widely quoted by many media outlets, including Newsweek, Time, Life, The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, C-SPAN, PBS, The History Channel, the BBC and VOA. It has been said that "Over the past generation, no one has written more deeply and spoken more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than Phyllis Tickle." A biography of Tickle, written by Jon M. Sweeney, was published in February 2018. Phyllis Tickle: A Life (Church Publishing, Inc), has been widely reviewed.

Reviews

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tickle’s work as the religion editor for Publishers Weekly provides an uneven but occasionally useful snapshot of religious life in the mid-1990s as illustrated by books sales. Tickle surveys what she describes as “the sacred,” “this wonderful country of the subjective world where we learn to love each other beyond judgmentalism or creeds” (12). In Chapter Two, she provides some historical orientation to the reality of the Baby Boomer’s worldview. Chapter Three, the most interesting and useful part of the book, breaks down the popular religious bestsellers into four categories: 1) Near-death experiences, angels, and aliens; 2) “books of ancient wisdom,” cf. Karen Armstrong, Crossan and Spong, and Jesus Seminar, renewed interest in Judaism and Kabbalah, etc., Native American spirituality, “Goddess” religions, and Buddhism; 3) self-help, and 4) Religious fiction. It would be interesting to do a similar survey at this point in time, including a qualitative survey of internet consumption. The rest of the book meanders confusingly between trying to imply what these bestsellers mean religious consumers are seeking, an attempted definition of religion, and interludes about Tickle’s experience with such figures as Desmond Tutu and John Shelby Spong; these latter interludes don’t obviously connect to the theme of the book, and it’s hard to see their purpose other than name-dropping.

My main criticism with this work is a kind of unsophisticated universalism that was attempted in chapters five and following. Tickle seems to imply that spirituality is common to all people, and that the former is necessary while the latter is optional. This essentialist reductionism 1) fails to account for the differences in basic presuppositions and details of religions from which the idea of “spirituality” (itself a Christian construct) springs, and 2) veers dangerously close to a kind of colonialism wherein other experiences of spirituality are measured against an unarticulated Christian norm. That is, in a valiant attempt to get Christianity out of spirituality, Tickle crams all the other kinds of spirituality into a Christian norm. A latter and less problematic criticism is the extremely dated nature of the work (even only twenty years later). Tickle concentrates on her own Baby Boomer generation, not even mentioning Generation X (to say nothing of the generation following). Even in the mid-nineties, to concentrate solely on paper book sales and survey consumption of religion without even mentioning the internet was a big omission – at this point in history, it looks downright irrelevant. Use Tickle’s book as an interesting look into a small slice of religious history, but don’t use it for its methodology or its philosophical assumptions.

[Eli Suddarth · Rating 1 out of 5]

A bait-and-switch; promising evaluation of literary trends then waxing long about her own spiritual reflections in the most verbose possible manner.