You might recall a college professor once mentioning that Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not just a pioneer for women's rights, but also a notable philosopher of the human soul. Maybe you've heard that Johnny Appleseed was generally known as a whacko-religious kook in his day. You probably remember knowing something, at some point, about someone called Sarah Farmer.

But I'm willing to bet that you don't spend much time thinking about how these people and their actions relate to one another or, more importantly, to contemporary American religious life. Leigh Eric Schmidt's new book Restless Souls, The Making of American Spirituality From Emerson to Oprah traces just those steps, offering an examination of the why and the how along the way.

In America, various forms of popular spirituality that aren't strictly affiliated with “traditional” Protestantism, Catholicism, or Judaism are often viewed as, or discussed in the media as, new age, neo-hippy, or cultish phenomena. We sometimes look at spiritually-oriented practices as latest crazes or temporary fads, absolutely isolated from one another and from the history of religion and culture. Schmidt's book explains how a number of pioneers created a new way of thinking about what religion can mean on a personal level. (Individualism, after all, is a core American value.) The roots of these “fads” date back to the very beginning of America and start to fully blossom in the middle of the 19th Century with Transcendentalism and American Mysticism. There is an actual cultural heritage, and this heritage is the meat of Restless Souls. Although Schmidt is not the first to write about influential American seekers—indeed, the ideological shift was written about as it grew into fruition by an array of historians and journalists from Octavius Brooks Frothingham to Frank Sanborn -, he is the most recent, and perhaps the only one to so clearly connect the dots between the then and the now (the 21st Century).

Schmidt's book is not an attack on or refusal to acknowledge organized religion. Rather it's an exploration of how the elements of various branches of that multi-cultural institution have been combined and have offered millions of Americans more personal and fulfilling spiritual lives through a legitimate and seldom discussed movement. Restless Souls is easy to read (although sometimes a bit academic, of course… it is a scholarly undertaking) and very educational. This makes a great holiday gift for anyone interested in an unexplored history of our people.