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Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Women's Issues Category Crystals, Reiki, Tarot, Goddess worship—why do these New Age tokens and practices capture the imagination of so many women? How has New Age culture become even more appealing than feminism? And are the two mutually exclusive? By examining New Age practices from macrobiotics to goddess worship to Native rituals, Feminism's New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism seeks to answer these questions by examining white women's participation in this hugely popular spiritual movement. While most feminist approaches to the New Age phenomenon have simply dismissed its adherents for their politically problematic racial appropriation practices, Karyln Crowley looks honestly at the political shortcomings of New Age beliefs and practices while simultaneously reckoning with the affective, political, and cultural motivations which have prompted New Age women's individual and collective spiritualities. New Age spirituality is in fact the dynamic outgrowth of a long-standing tradition of women's social and political power expressed through religious writings, art, and public discourse, and is key to understanding contemporary women's history and religion's role in modern American culture alike. Crowley offers a new and provocative assessment of the significance of the New Age movement, seen through a feminist and critical race studies lens.

In politics, ideas matter. They provide the foundation for economic policymaking, which in turn shapes what is possible in domestic and international politics. Yet until now, little attention has been paid to how these ideas are produced and disseminated, and how this process varies between countries.The National Origins of Policy Ideasprovides the first comparative analysis of how \"knowledge regimes\"-communities of policy research organizations like think tanks, political party foundations, ad hoc commissions, and state research offices, and the institutions that govern them-generate ideas and communicate them to policymakers. John Campbell and Ove Pedersen examine how knowledge regimes are organized, operate, and have changed over the last thirty years in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. They show how there are persistent national differences in how policy ideas are produced. Some countries do so in contentious, politically partisan ways, while others are cooperative and consensus oriented. They find that while knowledge regimes have adopted some common practices since the 1970s, tendencies toward convergence have been limited and outcomes have been heavily shaped by national contexts. Drawing on extensive interviews with top officials at leading policy research organizations, this book demonstrates why knowledge regimes are as important to capitalism as the state and the firm, and sheds new light on debates about the effects of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism, and the orientation of comparative political economy in political science and sociology.

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a popular rise of interest in the Jewish esoteric lore known as Kabbalah. Celebrity interest spurred a backlash against New Age trends and a revisitation of the traditional role of Kabbalah in Jewish history. In 2006, the episode “Secrets of Kabbalah” aired on the History Channel's popular paranormal series Decoding the Past. This article analyzes “Secrets of Kabbalah” in light of Jewish history and the New Age. It argues that the film uses a crisical, lachrymose conception of Jewish history to set up a dichotomy between traditional Jewish Kabbalah and the New Age. That is to say, the film bases itself on a history of crises and tears. The article further argues that the episode contains coded messages of critique against New Age developments in Kabbalah, thereby becoming a quasi-kabbalistic text itself. Finally, the article argues that in a postmodern turn, “Secrets of Kabbalah” becomes a part of the very pop-Kabbalah phenomenon that it sets out to critique through its usage of a history of Jewish crises.

Despite the popular roots of the holistic health/New Age movements, a growing number of biomedical physicians have become proponents of holistic health as well as New Age healing. Over the past two decades, Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra, two biomedically trained physicians, have emerged as the visible and financially successful spokespersons of the movement. This article provides brief biographical sketches of Weil and Chopra and compares and contrasts their respective views on health, illness, healing, and health care. It also considers the response of various biomedical parties to these holistic health/New Age gurus who have attempted to integrate biomedicine and various alternative healing and metaphysical systems. Finally, this article argues that Weil and Chopra both epitomize the limitations of the holistic health/New Age movements, albeit in different ways.