The spirituality of sustainability: Healing the self to heal the world through healthy living media

The concept of sustainability is the ligature of multiple discourses in the United States about personal, social and planetary health. Referring to an amalgamation of methods and practices that replenish and nourish rather than extract and deplete the raw materials that comprise and support a human body, a culture, an organism or an ecosystem, sustainability has formed the backbone of "green" politics, generated new conceptualizations of market economics, and operated as a touchstone upon which to base values and lifestyles. This dissertation examines the interlocking roles of media, marketplace and spirituality in a discourse about sustainability of the self, the social and the natural world. This discourse appears in a sector of the U.S. media and economy known as Healthy Living. Evolving from the New Age, this discourse evokes normative understandings about the "nature" of a holistic life, which frames the worldview that sees individuals, societies and the natural world thrown into a state of imbalance from the forces of late modernity. It is the therapeutic work of these media to show how one can heal the self as a way to heal the world, through commodified practices on the mind, body and spirit. In this way, the body is constructed as "sacred" space from which emanates a "consciousness" that reorients humans in the world, fueling specific actions that will shape the social world. Working through the public sphere of civic life and the private sphere of the body, the discourse claims a vision toward a postindustrial logic that will correct the course of modernity via the empowerment of elites who have the ability to participate in prescribed ways within the supply and demand dynamics of the commercial marketplace. This concomitant strategy holds implications for the study of religion and the evolution of its expression in contemporary America outside of the formal institutions of religion and for the relationship of media to those processes. At the core of the dissertation is an attempt to understand how and why a "spirituality of sustainability" takes form through the media and an exploration of its implications for social reform.