It was expected that by the end of the twentieth-century, due to human
achievement and technology, religion would be a mere fading memory in the minds and
the history books of modernized western people. This has been expressed through the
secularization thesis, which describes a “disenchantment” of western culture. Over the
last ten years, however, there has been a growing movement seeking to re-enchant this
culture by exploring and reconsidering religion, myth and spirituality. One of the most
powerful expressions of this is popularly referred to as the New Age Movement. This
thesis looks at the relationship between New Age and secularization theory, examining
the reasons for an apparent turn away from secularization. By using Jacques Ellul’s
interpretation of the history of the sacred, this thesis proposes that far from being a time
of secularization, modernism ushered in an era where the sacred canopy of Christianity
was replaced by a new sacred expression in the form of science and technology. In recent
years, however, the perceived failure of modernism has generated a search for a new set
of sacred expressions in western society. New Age and postmodernism are vehicles
which people are using to initiate this search. Currently both phenomena are looking to
three sources in order to recover meaning and control over life: the past and the distant,
nature and the self. The theoretical challenge New Age and postmodernism represents to
the secularization thesis is made concrete in the geography of the New Age Movement.
This thesis makes a physical connection between the New Age and areas of gentrification,
which contradicts the assumptions of the secularization thesis by proving that an area
which should be highly secularized is in fact a place of spiritual exploration.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/5011 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Mills, Colin Ivor |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
Page generated in 0.0071 seconds