Translocal Lives and Religion - Connections between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World - Philippe Bornet

Translocal Lives and Religion - Connections between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World - Philippe Bornet

5. Religion and the "Simple Life": Dugald Semple and Translocal "Life Reform" Networks

Translocal Lives and Religion - Connections between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World - Philippe Bornet

Steven J. Sutcliffe [+-]
University of Edinburgh
View Website
Steven Sutcliffe, University of Edinburgh, is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in the study of alternative religion in modernity and in the modern history of the study of religion/s. He is author of Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (2003), co-editor (with Ingvild Sælid Gilhus) of New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (2013) and co-editor (with Marion Bowman) of Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (2000). He also edited Religion: Empirical Studies (2004) and is a co-editor for the Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies monograph series. His current research includes the archive of the Scottish conscientious objector and ‘simple life’ practitioner, Dugald Semple (1884-1964), and the social and cultural history of the Gurdjieff-Ouspenskii movement.

Description

This chapter presents a case study of a Scottish exponent of the “simple life”, Dugald Semple (1884−1964), within early 20th-century networks of life reform or Lebensreform. It argues that the underlying thread in Semple’s “life reform” is a non-conformist, anti-clerical religious individualism which incorporated Transcendentalism with a Tolstoyan and Gandhian pacifism. A case study of Semple’s career in dialogue with his English and continental interlocutors demonstrates the value of empirically based transnational enquiry at the level of individuals and networks for understanding the varied inflections of “life reform”, particularly the religious roots of the phenomenon. It also contributes to the historiography of important currents in “alternative religion” which fed the post-world-war-two “new age”, “eco” and commune movements.

Notify A Colleague

Citation

Sutcliffe, Steven. 5. Religion and the "Simple Life": Dugald Semple and Translocal "Life Reform" Networks. Translocal Lives and Religion - Connections between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 123-148 Feb 2021. ISBN 9781781795835. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=31742. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.31742. Feb 2021

Dublin Core Metadata