Unholy Sensations : A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare by Joshua Paddison (2025, Hardcover)

Great Book Prices Store (339720)

96.8% positive Feedback

Price:

US $46.55

Approximately£34.27

+ $19.99 postage

Estimated delivery Mon, 4 Aug - Tue, 19 Aug

Returns:

14 days return. Buyer pays for return postage. If you use an eBay delivery label, it will be deducted from your refund amount.

Condition:

New

Unholy Sensations takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal.

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherOxford University Press, Incorporated

ISBN-100197775322

ISBN-139780197775325

eBay Product ID (ePID)6073634348

Product Key Features

Number of Pages280 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameUnholy Sensations : a Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare

Publication Year2025

SubjectChristianity / Denominations, General

TypeTextbook

AuthorJoshua Paddison

Subject AreaReligion

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1 in

Item Weight20 Oz

Item Length9.4 in

Item Width6.4 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2024-051282

Dewey Edition23

ReviewsUnholy Sensations is everything you could want from a book-sex! race! cults!-wrapped up in a tale that is as riveting as the research upon which is based is exhaustive. Joshua Paddison has provided us an origins story for some of the most powerful, yet contested, categories that continue to shape America's religious imagination. This is a must-read story for scholars, general readers, and students alike., "Unholy Sensations is everything you could want from a book-sex! race! cults!-wrapped up in a tale that is as riveting as the research upon which is based is exhaustive. Joshua Paddison has provided us an origins story for some of the most powerful, yet contested, categories that continue to shape America's religious imagination. This is a must-read story for scholars, general readers, and students alike." -- Benjamin E. Park, author of Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier"Joshua Paddington has a great story to tell of a spiritualist community and its scandalized detractors in 1890s California. Nuanced in its detail, Paddington's account of Fountaingrove and its mystic founder, Thomas Lake Harris, is mesmerizing, but his telling also manages to surface the very origins of the modern notion of a "cult" in the scare Harris generated-a critical contribution to the broader study of new religious movements and the politics of their categorization." -- Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, "Unholy Sensations is everything you could want from a book-sex! race! cults!-wrapped up in a tale that is as riveting as the research upon which is based is exhaustive. Joshua Paddison has provided us an origins story for some of the most powerful, yet contested, categories that continue to shape America's religious imagination. This is a must-read story for scholars, general readers, and students alike." -- Benjamin E. Park, author of Kingdom ofNauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier"Joshua Paddison has a great story to tell of a spiritualist community and its scandalized detractors in 1890s California. Nuanced in its detail, Paddison's account of Fountaingrove and its mystic founder, Thomas Lake Harris, is mesmerizing, but his telling also manages to surface the very origins of the modern notion of a "cult" in the scare Harris generated-a critical contribution to the broader study of new religious movements and the politics of theircategorization." -- Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, "Unholy Sensations is everything you could want from a book-sex! race! cults!-wrapped up in a tale that is as riveting as the research upon which is based is exhaustive. Joshua Paddison has provided us an origins story for some of the most powerful, yet contested, categories that continue to shape America's religious imagination. This is a must-read story for scholars, general readers, and students alike." -- Benjamin E. Park, author of Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier"Joshua Paddison has a great story to tell of a spiritualist community and its scandalized detractors in 1890s California. Nuanced in its detail, Paddison's account of Fountaingrove and its mystic founder, Thomas Lake Harris, is mesmerizing, but his telling also manages to surface the very origins of the modern notion of a "cult" in the scare Harris generated-a critical contribution to the broader study of new religious movements and the politics of their categorization." -- Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal289.9

Table Of ContentIntroduction: Secrets of the Sonoma Eden UnveiledPart One: Beginnings1. September 1890: The Pivotal Man2. April 1891: The Spiritual Reformer3. May 1891: The Wandering Apostate4. June 1891: A Samurai in Fairyland5. Autumn 1891: Enter Mr. XPart Two: Scandal6. December 1891: Worse than Mormons7. January 1892: Disorderly Doctrines8. February 1892: Spirit Versus Flesh9. Spring 1892: No More a Celibate10. January 1896: The Victim of an Ungodly SystemPart Three: Endings11. The Original Cult Leader12. The Angel of the Jails13. The Baron of FountaingroveEpilogue: The Land Has Been WaitingNotesAcknowledgementsIndex

SynopsisThe true story of the first California cult scandal In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a "new sexology" that was "worse than Mormonism." She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a "spiritual harem" that practiced "free love" and other gross immoralities. Media reports emphasized the presence of Japanese immigrant men at Fountaingrove, raising racialized specters of miscegenation and moral contamination. The international scandal, full of the sorts of salacious details prized by newspaper editors at the dawn of the era of yellow journalism, would last more than a decade, establishing Harris as the prototype for a new type of public menace-the "California cult leader." Unholy Sensations takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term "cult" has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation., Unholy Sensations tells the story of the first cult scandal in California and examines religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective., The true story of the first California cult scandalIn 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a "new sexology" that was "worse than Mormonism." She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a "spiritual harem" that practiced "free love" and other gross immoralities. Media reports emphasized the presence of Japanese immigrant men at Fountaingrove, raising racialized specters of miscegenation and moral contamination. The international scandal, full of the sorts of salacious details prized by newspaper editors at the dawn of the era of yellow journalism, would last more than a decade, establishing Harris as the prototype for a new type of public menace-the "California cult leader." Unholy Sensations takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term "cult" has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation.

LC Classification NumberBX9998.P33 2025