Dominic Green's *The Religious Revolution* is a captivating journey that begins in the mid-19th century, when Europe was shaken by burgeoning scientific and technological innovation. The power of the Church and monarchies had been supplanted by the ethereal challenges of democracy and capitalism. A need for change prevailed, a change that, while purporting to liberate women, slaves, and serfs, increasingly bound workers to their factories and subjected entire populations to empires. In the midst of this tumultuous period, the so-called "religious revolution" was forged.

Challenged by technology and industrialization, figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Baudelaire, Eliphas Lévi, Helena Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Wagner, Marx, Darwin, and Gandhi contributed their ideas and theories to create a new spirituality, distinct from traditional Western religion and inspired by nature, emotions, and intimacy.

Green has written a brilliant book, somewhere between historical and literary, in which he demonstrates how the advances of science, contact with other cultures, and the turbulent political and social changes of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries contributed to creating what is today's modern society.