Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Southern California, this paper explores how non-Indians use and appropriate statues of Hindu deities. In particular, I focus on a particular group of spiritual seekers who see these statues, or murtis , not as manifestations of the divine—that is, not as Hindu gods themselves—but instead as symbols that correspond to Jungian “archetypes.” This spiritual practice of “working with” an archetype is quite different from what one might encounter in a Hindu temple in India, and indeed, the underlying theologies of the practice map better onto American metaphysical religion than they do Hinduism. The article ends with a reflection on appropriation, focusing on the ways in which this spiritual practice promotes a form of universalism in which the very idea of appropriation becomes impossible.

Women’s spiritual entrepreneurship offers a new way of practicing capitalism in keeping with values traditionally coded as “feminine.” Operating as both a movement and a classification, spiritual entrepreneurship represents a capacious set of business practices centered on the belief that making money can be spiritually fulfilling. This possibility is actualized when spiritual entrepreneurship focuses on the traditionally feminine ideals of teaching and nurturing and utilizes spiritual practices such as meditation, manifesting, and mindfulness. This article explores the logics and rhetoric of women’s spiritual entrepreneurship in three prominent categories where these discourses are found: multi-level marketing, self-help products and guides, and women’s business coaching. Examples from each of these categories demonstrate how women’s spiritual entrepreneurship operates in the contemporary United States through shared ideals and religious practices.

“Moving the body is like religion and moving my body is the portal to that place.” This is one woman’s description of her practice of hoop dancing, a form of hula hooping that combines adult sized hoops and dance music. Her experience is not unique; in fact, the number of descriptions of hooping as a practice that is “like religion” serves as the basis of our research. In this essay, we examine the connection between embodied experiences in the hoop, the identification of those experiences as religious or spiritual, and the communities that are created as hoopers attempt to continually recapture the experiences (of flow) that they deem extraordinary. New religions studies is a field interested in the emergence of new religious paths, and our contribution to this academic discourse is in the form of an ethnography of value of the hoop community as an emerging religious path. Our work attempts to reconceptualize newness in the field through innovations in the hoop community. We examine the ways hoopers deem transformational experiences within the hoop as spiritual or religious and how they construct paths to truth and authenticity through embodied practice. These new religious movements are not institutional nor are they tied to formal creeds; rather, they reflect the ways in which religion has become a category of experience that can create meaningful communities of practice for individuals.

The following article describes and analyzes the spirituality of taiji quan in the West. Constructed around a particular North American perception of this Chinese martial art, the spirituality is based on discursive strategies that enable authors of taiji quan books (and their readers) to make sense of their practice in a North American context. Using reception theories and Gadamer’s notion of fusion of horizon , three points will be highlighted here: 1) taiji quan books published in North America since the 1960s present this martial art as a spiritual practice 2) which the authors perceive as a Chinese Daoist spirituality 3) but which in fact is actualized in a North American socio-cultural context so that it meets the expectations of a certain category of practitioners. This means that the “spirituality of taiji quan ” as presented by Western books has less to do with Chinese religious tradition than contemporary spirituality cloaked in old Daoist imagery.