As a piece of Thanksgiving turkey - or is it stuffing? - I gave the Theorizing Religion students How We Gather over the break. This is a report prepared by two students at Harvard Divinity School about new communities, formal and informal and even commercial, which seem to offer religiously non-affiliated millennials ways of building community, pursing personal and social transformation, finding purpose, etc. 
I left the discussion to the students, since they're millennials and I'm not - though I learned that, by the standard definition, many of my students are born too late to count as millennials. They were happy to own the millennial moniker, though, and all had much to say about the search for religious or spiritual bearings beyond institutionalized "religion."
What's interesting about the folks described in How We Gather - and recognized by several students - is that many would swear off the term "spiritual." That, apparently, comes with too much "baggage" now too! So even the SBNR (spiritual but not religious) have been outflanked! What's left, after "I'm into religion, not the church," and "I'm not into institutionalized religion" and finally "I'm spiritual but not religious"? Judging from our discussion it might be that thing which church and religion originally defined themselves against: cults! Several of the gatherings described have "cult"-like characteristics, owned and even half-ironically celebrated by their members. (It seems connected somehow to brands and their supposedly empirically demonstrated ways of transforming your life.)
CBNS. I didn't see that coming.
I left the discussion to the students, since they're millennials and I'm not - though I learned that, by the standard definition, many of my students are born too late to count as millennials. They were happy to own the millennial moniker, though, and all had much to say about the search for religious or spiritual bearings beyond institutionalized "religion."
CBNS. I didn't see that coming.
