The evolution of American spirituality over the past fifty years is the subject of Robert Wuthnow's engrossing new book. Wuthnow uses in-depth interviews and a broad range of resource materials to show how Americans, from teenagers to senior citizens, define their spiritual journeys. His findings are a telling reflection of the changes in beliefs and lifestyles that have occurred throughout the United States in recent decades. Wuthnow reconstructs the social and cultural reasons for an emphasis on a spirituality of dwelling (houses of worship, denominations, neighborhoods) during the 1950s. Then in the 1960s a spirituality of seeking began to emerge, leading individuals to go beyond established religious institutions. In subsequent chapters Wuthnow examines attempts to reassert spiritual discipline, encounters with the sacred (such as angels and near-death experiences), and the development of the "inner self." His final chapter discusses a spirituality of practice , an alternative for people who are uncomfortable within a single religious community and who want more than a spirituality of endless seeking. The diversity of contemporary American spirituality comes through in the voices of the interviewees. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and Native Americans are included, as are followers of occult practices, New Age religions, and other eclectic groups. Wuthnow also notes how politicized spirituality, evangelical movements, and resources such as Twelve-Step programs and mental health therapy influence definitions of religious life today. Wuthnow's landmark book, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988), documented the changes in institutional religion in the United States; now After Heaven explains the changes in personal spirituality that have come to shape our religious life. Moreover, it is a compelling and insightful guide to understanding American culture at century's end. In The Restructuring of American Religion , Robert Wuthnow examined the changing patterns of institutional religion in contemporary America. In After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, he makes a similar analysis of personal spirituality. His basic argument is that professional and social mobility makes it hard for Americans to sustain spiritual life because they don't feel rooted in one place; therefore, they embark on spiritual searches "characterized more often by dabbling than by depth." In contrast to these "dwelling-oriented" and "seeking-oriented" spiritualities, Wuthnow observes that increasing numbers of religious people are turning to "practice-oriented" spirituality--"making a deliberate attempt to relate to the sacred" through disciplines such as reading, prayer, and service. Wuthnow is passionately interested in the question of how an individual's search for spiritual identity affects our society, so he explains that although practice-oriented spirituality may initially seem to weaken the authority of religious institutions, spiritual practices "ultimately sustain these institutions by giving individuals the moral fortitude to participate in them without expecting too much from them." Wuthnow's prose is clean and clear, and his argumentation is thoroughly humane: every idea is conveyed through stories taken from interviews with hundreds of people of varying ages, races, religions, and classes. After Heaven stands with Wuthnow's previous work, and Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart as a landmark in the sociology of religion. --Michael Joseph Gross Analyzing the development of spirituality in the last half-century, Wuthnow (God and Mammon in America, LJ 9/1/94) uses in-depth interviews and opinion surveys?and a firm grasp of existing scholarly material on the subject?to effectively draw connections between individual experiences and wider cultural developments. Showing how the meaning of spirituality has grown and changed over the past 50 years, Wuthnow contrasts the more stable but comforting "dwelling-oriented" spirituality with the more dynamic but less secure "seeker-oriented" spirituality. After tracing the relationship between these two approaches from the early 1950s to the late 1990s, he then suggests what he calls "practice-oriented" spirituality as a way to give both "roots and wings" to spirituality in the future. Anyone interested in the field will definitely want to read this work, a scholarly and readable examination with some creative insights. Recommended for academic and public libraries.?C. Robert Nixon, M.L.S., Lafayette, IN Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Basing his argument on detailed interviews of a wide range of respondents, on existing research studies, and on large-scale opinion surveys, Wuthnow describes a shift in the spiritual orientation of Americans. A spirituality of "dwelling" was characteristic of mainline denominations up through the 1950s; animated by a desire to be in place, it emphasized habitation, which was expressed