From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era

From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era. By Stephen A. Kent. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. xy-ii, 243 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8156-2923-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8156-2948-6.)

The author, a sociologist of religion at the University of Alberta, describes the focus of this work as "the cultural transition of American youth from radical politics to mystical religion in the late 1960s and early 1970s." His sources include twenty in-depth interviews of militants of the era together with the perusal of a staggering amount of ephemera in various archives and his personal collection.

Roughly the first quarter of the...