Channeling Zone American Spirituality in an Anxious Age

"Like vaudeville, as Michael F. Brown points out in this artful analysis of a largely artless, anti-analytical phenomenon, channeling mirrors individual desires and social expectations and thus provides a rich field for academic investigation....Happily, 'The Channeling Zone' digs beneath the fluff. Mr. Brown explores the ways channeling experiments with sexual identity (most channels are female, while most of the spirits they embody are male), retails religion and celebrates our post-modern fascination with multiple identities (channeling has 'elevated the protean impulse to a sacred principle'). He sees channeling, correctly , as utterly American in its individualism, commercialism, and faith in progress....Mr. Brown, then, deals splendidly with the subtexts of channelling, and describes, perhaps too gently, its intellectual vapidity, moral slipperiness, and social solipsism."Brown, Michael F. is the author of 'Channeling Zone American Spirituality in an Anxious Age' with ISBN 9780674108820 and ISBN 0674108825.