New Age in Wonderland

The Neo-Hippie Religion Replacing Atheism Among the Young

The class was called “God, World, and Soul,” and I was sitting in a group with four other philosophy students at a state university. The topic of discussion was the nature of religious experience, and one of my colleagues had shared what he considered to be one of the most defining moments of his life. He had been walking through a forest with a friend, he explained, when suddenly—apropos, evidently, of nothing—he and his friend both felt what he called a “distinctly feminine presence.” The beauty of his natural surroundings weighed upon him, and all at once he felt that “everything was one,” that his own individual essence was inextricably and indistinguishably intertwined with the essence...