No Nonsense Spirituality by Britt Hartley

Read the full post at - No Nonsense Spirituality by Britt Hartley I picked this book up after hearing the author interviewed on a podcast — and by “picked up” I mean it was on sale on Amazon and seemed worth a quick read. The book is aimed squarely at a growing slice of the American population: the “Nones.” People who’ve left an established church but haven’t exactly gone full atheist either. The spiritual-but-not-religious crowd. If you’ve been following any polling on American religious identity over the past decade, you know this is a bigger and bigger group. Hartley herself is ex-Mormon and clearly well-read — both in academic religious studies and from within her own faith tradition. That background gives her a fluency and confidence when covering a pretty wide landscape of religious and spiritual practices. She doesn’t talk down to either side. The closest comparison I can make is to the new atheists who were popular in the early 2000s — Dawkins, Hitchens, that crowd. They made…