“Contemporary spiritualities” and “New Age”

While the first theorists of secularization foresaw the gradual disappearance of religion from the public sphere, others observed a reorganization or even a “return of the sacred” on a worldwide scale. Aside from fundamentalisms which strongly uphold the idea of “tradition” and strengthen borders, new forms of religious expression have appeared transnationally, most often deinstitutionalized and integrated in civil society: for example, the “new religious movements”, and especially the more diffused and nebulous networks, groups and movements known under the generic terms of “New Age” and “contemporary spiritualities”.This session seeks to explore these new forms of transnational religiosity expressed through the notions of “spiritualities” and “New Age” from the perspectives of ethnography and the comparative social history of religion