Spirituality -- Indigenous, Nature worship 

"This study reveals an unorganized and previously unacknowledged religion at the heart of American culture. Nature, Albanese argues, has provided a compelling religious center throughout American history. In a book of remarkable originality and vision, Albanese charts the multiple histories of American nature religion and explores the moral and spiritual responses the encounter with nature has provoked throughout American history. Tracing the connections between movements and individuals both unconventional and established, Albanese treats figures from popular culture, such as the nineteenth-century Hutchinson Family Singers and almanac-version Davy Crockett, as well as historically prominent culture brokers, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir.

Just as there are variant understandings of what nature is, there are diverse nature religions. Moving beyond Algonkian Indians, Anglo-American Puritans, and Revolutionary War patriots, Albanese argues persuasively for a classic American double vision of nature, notably articulated by Emerson and Thoreau. On the one hand, nature was real, and Americans should live in harmony with it; on the other, nature was illusory, and they should master it with the power of mind. The conceptual crack between nature real and nature illusory dogged later Americans: Albanese explores nineteenth-century wilderness preservation and mind cure and turns her attention, too, to physical forms of nature healing in movements such as water cure, homeopathy, and chiropractic. She goes on in the twentieth century to find that quantum provides a powerful metaphor to fill the crack between contrary views of nature. And she discovers old and new together in politically organized Greens and feminist followers of the Goddess, who also share a common landscape with nature writer Annie Dillard and Bear Tribe founder Sun Bear, with Reiki initiate healers and practitioners of macrobiotics.

Throughout Nature Religion in America, Albanese emphasizes those who have not been formally trained as theologians, ceremonial leaders, or ethical guides. She demonstrates that nature religion in America has flourished among a cadre of people who have thought and acted for themselves. The first of its kind, this study is a preliminary guide to a vast and previously uncharted religious world. It will become essential reading for all students of American religion and for general readers who themselves took to nature as the site of the sacred." -- Book jacket. 

xvi, 267 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. 

Includes index.