CHAPTER 10: Fundamentals of the New Age

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CHAPTER 10 Fundamentals of the New Age

• cultural expansion
• New Age
• cultural contraction
• fundamentalism evangelicalism
• Softening the Boundaries--New Spirituality and
  the Emerging Church

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New Age Movement since the 60s

• energy healing
• chakras crystals
• channeling
• Helen Schucman A Course In Miracles
• UFOs otherworldly visitors
• Shirley MacLaine Out on a Limb

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Religious Roots of the New Age

• Transcendentalists
• New Thought
• Theosophists
• I AM Movement Guy Ballard
• Arcane School Alice Bailey
• Asian Native American teachers

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Cultural Roots of the New Age

• quantum physics
• humanistic psychology
• parapsychology
• holistic healers
• astrologers
• ecological movement

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New Age Beliefs

• expectation of a new age
• desire to find God/Self within
• correspondence
• power of Mind
• combination

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New Age Rhetoric

• energy
• healing
• harmony
• universe
• planet
• earth as a living being

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Types of New Age Ritual Work

• harmony with the material world
• Reiki
• mental journey to nonmaterial worlds
• New Age shamanism

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Conservative Protestantism in the 1940s

• Fundamentalists
• American Council of Christian Churches
• Evangelicals
• National Association of Evangelicals
• Christianity Today
• Billy Graham

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Search for Conservative Identity

• premillennial dispensationalism
• rapture
• Left Behind series
• literal belief in the Bible
• separatist tendency

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Trends in Conservative Christianity

• regional religion
• megachurches
• dominion theology
• charismatic experience

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Conservative Evangelism

• electronic church
• Christian radio
• televangelism
• internet ministries
• Christian booksellers

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Christian Right

• Jerry Falwells Moral Majority
• Pat Robertsons Christian Coalition
• Condemnation of secular humanism
• creationism
• countertrend Sojourners

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Conservative Religion

• centrality of Jesus
• born again rhetoric
• missions revivals
• Bible study prayer
• Personal holiness

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New Spirituality and the Emerging Church

• Changing patterns in American religion
• Softening boundaries and moving away from poles
• Incorporating culture

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New Spirituality

• New Age dissolving into new spirituality
• Sheilaism
• generation of seekers
• widespread beliefs
• self-help
• energy
• holistic healing

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Emerging Church

• Evangelicals and postmodernism
• Salvation from postmodernism
• Learning from postmodernism
• Being both evangelical and postmodern
• Prophetic impulse
• Restoring early church practices
• "Candles and incense"
• Being missional
• Postevangelicalism and (liberal) politics

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Similarities of Conservative Christians New
Agers

• millennial themes
• direct experience
• personal transformation
• ongoing revelation
• language of healing

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OVERVIEW

• Expansion
• New Age
• new spirituality
• channeling
• energy healing
• self-help

Contraction Fundamentalism Evangelicalism Christia
n Right Bible Jesus millennial themes

• Combination and loosening boundaries
• New Spirituality
• Emerging Church