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Neuromatic: Or, A Particular History of Religion and the Brain
John Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology’s pivotal role in religious history.
In Neuromatic , religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.
What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.
In Neuromatic , religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.
What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.
442 pages, Paperback
Published September 29, 2021
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About the author
John Lardas Modern
6 books6 followersModern earned his bachelor's in religion from Princeton University in 1993, his master's in comparative religion from Miami University of Ohio (1996) and his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003.
Modern teaches classes in American religious history, literature, technology, and aesthetics at Franklin and Marshall College. His work has appeared in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Church History, and Religion. Modern's research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
Modern teaches classes in American religious history, literature, technology, and aesthetics at Franklin and Marshall College. His work has appeared in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Church History, and Religion. Modern's research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.
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September 19, 2024
Wow, this one had everything: ecstatic religious Revivals, histories of Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), secularism, seances, Scientology! A thoroughly enjoyable dense read. I picked this up because I read Modern for a paper discussing the history of secularism in American literature, and his research interest in the interaction between religion and psychological practice in the U.S. is, to understate it immensely, right up my alley, as a hospital chaplain.
Bonus points for the terrific and telling photography preserved in this volume. You got stills of punk band The Cramps doing a show at a state psychiatric hospital, L. Ron Hubbard presiding over a spell-bound crowd, schematics of the early cybernetic theory. This one ruled, would love for it to get more play outside of academia.
Bonus points for the terrific and telling photography preserved in this volume. You got stills of punk band The Cramps doing a show at a state psychiatric hospital, L. Ron Hubbard presiding over a spell-bound crowd, schematics of the early cybernetic theory. This one ruled, would love for it to get more play outside of academia.
Displaying 1 of 1 review