The Reluctant Spiritualist Quotes

“American spiritualism -- a movement that at its peak claimed more than a million followers -- was born out of the basic human longing for contact with a loved one lost to death. but to literalists, spiritualism's true spark came in 1848 from something no more or less powerful than a bored teenage girl.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart , The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“Swept along by the religious revivalism known as America's Great Awakening, scores of charismatic preachers had descended upon the communities surrounding the Erie Canal to win the souls of its citizens and convert them to a variety of evangelical and radical sects.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“Maggie and Katy found themselves trapped. 'Soon it went so far and so many persons had heard the 'rappings' that we could not confess the wrong without exciting very great anger on the part of the those we had deceived So we went right on," Maggie would explain forty years later.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“...within a few weeks, the young minister Reverend George York , had expelled the family, accusing them of blasphemy and devil worship. their neighbors suspected the some of them feared the Foxes were in league with the devil, and must have encouraged their daughters to join them by engaging in some kid of 'witchcraft.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“B the spring of 1848, the religious climate was still unsettled and ripe for progressive new ideas. America's cities were expanding, its populations swelling with immigrants from Ireland and Europe, its factories and ports booming all of which contributed to a rising mortality rate.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“By the late 1840s, anticipation of a better life and the concept of 'progress' had become an American touchstone, a national expectation.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart , The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“According to Swedenborg, all human experience was only a reflection of a larger spiritual one. The human soul was what gave meaning and expression to the concrete world.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“Spiritualism, born out of the same discontent with social restrictions and punitive theologies as the suffrage movement, ended up even sharing the same table. The subsequent meeting, at the Seneca Falls Universalist Wesleyan Church on July 19-20 would ignite the woman's suffrage movement, setting the stage for a seventy-two year battle that resulted in the 1920 passage of the Twenty-First Amendment.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“For the next quarters of a century, spiritualism, with its benevolent view of the soul and advocacy of social reform, was a serious concern for many suffragists.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“Critics would tar feminism and spiritualism with the same brush, branding both movements as absurd flights of fancy an worse, contributors to the erosion of home and hearth.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“All disease, she {Mary Baker Eddy}, asserted in her 1876 first edition of 'Science and Health,' the bible of her new faith, was a fiction of the soul. Neither disease nor matter existed. Both were creations of the soul which symbolized the universal mind, of Jesus Christ, at work.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“As was done at the time of Maggie's death, scientists and individuals today are still pondering the possibility, if not the certainty, of the eternal life of the human soul. like death itself, this remains one of our greatest mysteries.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“With the onset of World War I and the deaths of thousands of young men, a new generation of spiritualists appeared. One of the most prominent was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes detective series, whose pro-spiritualist book "New Revelation" was published in 1917.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox

“Is telepathy merely a coincidence after all -- a complex series of associations, as traditional schools of psychology would have it?
If so, how can we explain those irrational yet memorable instances when we have sensed that a distant loved one is in danger or on the brink of death?”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: A Life of Maggie Fox