———. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Hirstein, William. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT …[^16]: Colin Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,” in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972): 119–36. Reprinted in Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw eds., The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an…
Jeffrey Kaplan
scholar · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Jeffrey Kaplan is a scholar of religious movements, esotericism, and fringe cultures who edited a foundational collection on the "cultic milieu"—the networked underground of alternative spiritual, conspiratorial, and countercultural communities operating outside mainstream institutions. His work, particularly *New Age Religion and Western Culture*, frames how non-rationalist thought systems circulate and transform within globalized networks, a concept the course uses to understand how AI anxieties, technological mysticism, and speculative ideologies proliferate in contemporary culture. By mapping the cultic milieu's structure, Kaplan's scholarship provides tools for analyzing how machine learning narratives and cybernetic utopianism function as modern esoteric belief systems.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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Heléne Lööw 2Mack Lamoureux 2Alex Jones 1Cary Nelson 1Catherine Malabou 1Cynthia Sue Larson 1Daniel L. Schacter 1David Ingvar 1Elaine Scarry 1Endel Tulving 1Fredric Jameson 1George M. Marsden 1John Lamb Lash 1Joseph E. LeDoux 1Kevin Kelly 1Lawrence Grossberg 1Martin Lepage 1Peter Knight 1Richard Hofstadter 1Timothy Melley 1William Hirstein 1Colin Campbell 1Fiona Broome 1Nelson Mandela 1Reece 1