| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture. Ed. by Jeffrey J. Kripal and Glenn W. Shuck. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. xiv, 323 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-253-34556-1. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-253-21759-8.)

Considering its formative role in promoting alternative spiritual and holistic healing trends since the 1960s, Esalen has garnered little scholarly attention. The essays in this book go a long way toward giving Esalen its due as an important site of religious and therapeutical experimentation and coalescence in twentieth-century America. The essays are mostly the result of a conference held at Esalen in 2003, and they are shaped by that context. Many of the authors emphasize the groundbreaking role Esalen played in the melding of body, mind, and spirit during an era when religion and physical healing were usually clearly demarcated, each within its own institutional boundaries. Long before sociologists identified the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as periods of spiritual seeking, Esalen had institutionalized that approach to religious knowledge and experience. Even in the conservative evangelical imagination, as Glenn W. Shuck points out in his contribution, "Satan's Hot Springs," Esalen has been a potent symbol of humanistic, non-institutionalized spirituality.

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