Congratulations to Professor Wayne Hudson

16 Dec 2022 - by

Congratulations to ACC&C Adjunct Scholar Professor Wayne Hudson on his election to the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The Academy is an independent, not-for-profit organisation with a Fellowship of over 660 humanities leaders. It is one of Australia’s five Learned Academies – independent organisations established to encourage excellence in their respective fields and to provide expertise and advice at public, institutional and government levels. Professor Hudson is one of 37 members elected in 2022 in recognition of his work in Australian religious thought, the role of English Deism in the Enlightenment, and the connections between religion, utopia, and reform.

More about the Australian Academy of the Humanities

Further Congratulations to Professor Hudson are in order for the publication of his new book Beyond Religion and the Secular:
Creative Spiritual Movements and their Relevance to Political, Social and Cultural Reform, (Bloomsbury, 2022).

About the book:

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion', this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect.Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá'ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives.Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.

Table of Contents

1. Rethinking the Terrain
2. The Bahá'ís: Prosociality and Global Civilisation
3. Soka Gakkai and Cosmic Humanism
4. Ananda Marga and Bengali Futurism
5. Brahma Kumaris: Between Apocalypse and Modernism
6. The Church Universal and Triumphant: Democratic Fictionality
7. The Latter-day Saints: Charismatic Restoration
8. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index