Religion
Collectors of Mystics: How an Editor, a Philosopher, and a Ghostwriter Remade Modern American Religion
Based on a newly discovered archive of Eugene Exman, who ran the Religious Books Department at Harper & Brothers from 1928 until 1965, this book explores how religion in the United States was remade in the middle of the twentieth century. More specifically, it examines how Exman and his close friend and collaborator Margueritte Bro brought into the world hundreds of bestsellers that popularized the research of the philosopher/psychologist William James and the perennial philosophy of interreligious unity. In an era in which books still really mattered, these books carried from the academy to middlebrow readers the connected convictions that all religions are one, that religion is about individual experience not rituals or dogmas, and that the search for meaning launched in the interwar years could only be satisfied through contemplative practices such as prayer and meditation. The book follows this impulse into the worlds of liberal Protestants, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and LSD experimenters by looking closely at a series of books whose authors shared Exman’s (and Bro’s) intense focus on religious experience and their equally intense commitment to social action. These authors include the Protestant preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, the British expat novelist Aldous Huxley, the Catholic radical Dorothy Day, and the Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.