LoRusso's book offers a wide-ranging survey of forms of spirituality in the workplace, tracing the phenomenon back to roots in New Deal and postwar industrialist attempts to re-mythologize work, articulating its various Boomer-era forms that blossomed especially in the 1980s and 1990s, and exploring it through two ethnographic studies of less-well-known examples. Overall, the book's aim is “to document some of the ways that ‘spirituality’ has been enlisted in a wide range of business contexts over time” (9), but also to explain it as “a useful strategy for bolstering the power of business elites” under neoliberalism because it has “normalized new practices and modes of individual subjectivity” (11).

LoRusso performs a valuable service in his encyclopedic yet brisk treatment of a wide and varied set of movements and figures that forge links between religious language and the workplace. Popular examples like Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership and John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism appear alongside less prominent but influential figures like Willis Harman's “humanistic capitalism” and Judi Neal's institution-building activities. The wide range confirms LoRusso's debunking of every generation's claim that these links are “novel” (66), and also shows to religious scholars and theologians the willingness of every age to peel off, bricoleur-like, free-floating concepts and practices from complex religious traditions. Much of this literature sells more copies and impacts real-world practices far more pervasively than theological books, yet theologians are almost entirely ignorant of it. LoRusso's able work here is a helpful remedy, marred only by its dreadful copyediting, with typographical errors everywhere.

This wide-rangingness, a strength in one way, proves more problematic in others. Two are worth noting. One, the study lacks the thoroughness of path-breaking books in the field, such as Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart. Moreton's study focused on powerful ways in which residual elements of Christian culture are integrated to serve the identification of workers with Wal-Mart, and was very convincing, whereas LoRusso's connections of various movements are looser and less convincing. He admits that all these different movements are “widely scattered groups that often lack an awareness of one another” but nevertheless are “an extended family of formal and informal groups, bound together culturally, who engage in a shared discourse …” (121–22). It is not clear that there is actually a shared discourse here among groups that are so regionally and generationally disparate, although there may be family resemblances.

However, the claim that they “share” a discourse and are “bound together culturally” is the necessary correlate to his claim that they all aim at a justification of the neoliberal order and the formation of a self properly conformed to that order. Partly, the claim is difficult to sustain because LoRusso is often doing neutral, descriptive work—and doing it well—and then turns quickly and without much argumentation to this further, contestable claim. But the real difficulty, I think, is once again the desire to combine too many disparate phenomena under one umbrella. For example, LoRusso's treatment of the Quaker educator Parker Palmer as someone offering “a program for psychic survival” amid the “unpredictable global economy” (69) is a highly suspicious reading of someone with Palmer's background. Figures like Palmer and Greenleaf sound much more like sincere attempts to respond to an ongoing (although changing) experience of work as “toil” or “obligation,” by recovering a genuine sense of interiority and personal reciprocity, and far less like the oddball eclecticism of Steve Jobs or the entrepreneurial zeal of Judi Neal. But LoRusso's thesis allows for no distinction between a Gnosticizing dualism rooted in New Age escapism and a holism that seeks to elevate what John Paul II would have called “the subjective value of work.” Instead, all comers are characterized as apologists for a broadly characterized neoliberalism.

Despite these caveats, the book remains an informative tour through a variety of landscapes that will interest both those (largely in theology or American studies) who never see into this world and those (largely in management) who may be captive to a particular language paradigm (“fad”) with an inadequate sense of the history or comparative significance of it.