Drifting Through Samsara: Tacit Conversion and Disengagement in Goenka's Vipassana Movement

ISBN-13: 9780197579961 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 264 str.

Masoumeh Rahmani

Recenzje

Highly innovative, brilliantly written, and based on solid research, Drifting through Samsara is one of the best books on (de)conversion that I have read in the last fifteen years. The book addresses an important lacuna in the conversion literature by theoretically expanding religious disaffiliation. Rahmani's research findings challenge the conventional religious exit literature by showing that authenticity discourse is not a motive for disengagement, but rather an effort to reconstruct an alternative universe of discourse. Tacit conversion is a great new concept to capture how many converts deny and conceal their conversion experience, and why they do that.

O autorze

Masoumeh Rahmani is a lecturer in Religious Studies at the School of Social and Cultural Studies in Victoria University of Wellington. She received her PhD from the University of Otago in 2017 and has previously held a research associate position in the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour lab at Coventry University. Her research interests include religious change, meditation movements, atheism and unbelief, and Asian spiritualities in non-Asian contexts. Her latest longitudinal project explored the diversity of "unbelief" in the mindfulness subcultures of the UK and the US and examined the influence of the practice on the worldviews of non-religious/atheist practitioners.