Bucar sets out, in this edgy title, to combat the fitness and wellness industries that have turned spiritual practice into something about looking good, personal therapy, and presenting well. She admits: “For a while I was on board. I thought I could access the benefits of spirituality through products, celebrity examples, and life hacks without getting involved in the messiness of religion.”
Her Introduction is titled, “Why the Spiritual Salad Bar Isn’t Serving Us,” which unfortunately reminds some of us of a criticism commonly made of the multifaith-verse a quarter century ago. Then, the metaphor was used to argue that picking and choosing this and that religious belief or spiritual practice, to blend in a new bowl of mixed spiritual greens, was inherently wrong. Bucar’s point is not to resurface that particular criticism, but to emphasize how “your favorite spiritual self-care technique is probably a knockoff of a religious one.” So, what if it is? Bucar goes on to explain that ethical frameworks have been lost or ignored, as have commitments to community, ways of understanding suffering and sickness, and insights into human nature. For those essentials, she argues, recent history has shown that we need religion, not just spirituality that’s stripped of it.
She writes as a scholar and teacher of religion, not as someone with a religious affiliation; she tells the reader that she doesn’t have one.
There are “missing ingredients at the spiritual salad bar,” Bucar writes. And she uses her own researches into fields ranging from psychedelics to kirtan to make the point, as well as personal experience such as: “I have come to see my yoga practice as a way to train myself to be a better person, not just cultivate physical flexibility or emotional resilience.” Her point is: “I’m interested in how restoring religious context to wellness practices can make them more ethical.”
