ABOUT THIS BOOK

John Modern offers a powerful and original critique of neurology’s pivotal role in religious history.

In Neuromatic, religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.

What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

John Lardas Modern is professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He is the author of The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs and Secularism in Antebellum America, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

“This book is magisterial in scope—masterfully researched, carefully considered, subtly theorized, and energetically executed. Wrangling published, archival, and media sources into a deliberately nonlinear genealogy, Neuromatic will be essential for scholars of religion, history, philosophy, and science studies.”

— Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University

“Neuromatic is equal parts brilliant critical analysis and affectionate polemic. I strongly recommend it to my colleagues in the cognitive sciences who should know about the metaphysical skeletons in our closets. I recommend it to everyone else because reading it is so much fun.”

— Anthony Chemero, University of Cincinnati

“Neuromatic, though masquerading as both a poke at the smugness of supposedly secular science and a plea against reductionism, is up to something more interesting: anamnesis. It wants us to stop forgetting everything that went into making the brain the font of all order—pills, electro-shock therapy, EEGs, TV screens, cognitive anthropology and other findings from the twilight zone of cybernetics. With flashes of insight going off in an antic zigzag logic, Neuromatic fires on as many synapses as the “enchanted loom” of the brain itself. Modern, a library cormorant of the first order, provides a history of oddballs and kooks, including some heroes of postwar science, and I ended up not being able to tell them apart. I found my brain happily scrambled after reading this book. Neuromatic gleefully demonstrates how the effort to create binaries of pure-dirty, science-kookiness, truth-fabrication, sobriety-credulity, secular-religious fails again and again. An ultimately sane plea to linger in the midworld."

— John Durham Peters, Yale University

"Modern balances the academic and the bizarre with a colorful cast of characters from history, from religious scholars to scientists to psychics. There’s something for anyone with a curious mind."

— LNP

"Neuromatic is a fascinating exploration of the intertwined histories of religion and the brain. More than anything, it raises the question of the nature of belief — whether we can know the unknowable through these shadows that we chase around the cave of the skull."

— Psychology Today

"A powerful intervention into how notions of the secular are proliferated and internalized. . . . An innovative and imaginative work that shows the inner workings of our commonsense understandings of ourselves and our world."

— Reading Religion

"This is a wild ride, engaging and rewarding."

— Choice

"[A] fascinating and wide-ranging survey."

— International Society for Science and Religion

“A full immersion in that complex world of neuroscience with its many—and at times bizarre—applications, and the occasionally surreal world of cognitive science of religion . . . converging in the supreme attempt to reduce religion to that same pattern. This is an insightful book . . . impiously critical."

— Reviews in Science, Religion, and Theology

"What do scholars of religion think about the methodologies and explanations rendered in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR)? In Neuromatic, Modern consults a wide range of empirical literature as well as humanist theory about the brain sciences to consider the relation between the concept of religion and the concept of the brain. His book. . . suggests it is not sufficient to study religion without also being aware of its position in broader historical and cultural contexts."

— Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

"In equal turns frustrating, fascinating, and unique."

— Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture

"Among the great virtues of Neuromatic is to show how dark indeed have been systematizers’ assaults on the spirit in the cause of making legible the interior life, of making the brain the organ of reason and order. That project demanded strange machines, cruel experiments, and an extravagant credulity in scientific progress."

— Tracy Fessenden, Religious Studies Review Forum

"Neuromatic had my synapses firing like disco lights at Studio 54—its own kind of Dream Machine."

— William Robert, Religious Studies Review Forum

"What I see John doing here, a high and lovely and estimable thing, is a play with scholarly format via the CULTURE JAM. The book dismantles, sure, but it also creates a Gysin-like fog over the brain, so that Swedenborg’s angels can cavort with electric love therapists. Neurmatic is an irruption in the long attempt to figure out human difference."

— Jason Bivins, Religious Studies Review Forum

"While critical theorists of the John Modern variety might not be worried about violating religious taboos, they can be creeped out by scientific confidence in the ability to make everything measurable and intelligible . . . Throughout Neuromatic, there is a looming sense of calamity lurking behind human attempts to master the brain."

— Finbarr Curtis, Religious Studies Review Forum

"John has compiled the most beautiful and indeed meticulous genealogy of the conditions that allow the cognitive science of religion to constitute knowledge. He also shows the absurd humanity involved in that process. . . The scientists are Ahab, obsessively trying to chart the white whale, and John is Ishmael, somewhere in the ship, trying to tell a story about what is going on."

— Gabriel Levy, Religious Studies Review Forum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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