Unholy Sensations

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 *

Joshua Paddison is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of History at Texas State University and the author of American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California.