Harvey Cox's two previous books, The Secular City and The Feast of Fools (both of them original, influential best sellers), have made him the best known and most iconoclastic writer on religion in America today.

Harvey Cox's new book is about the roots of religious feeling, about the need to find in the complex aspects of contemporary life—the new awakening of the encounter movement and the growing interest in Eastern mysticism—the sources of a new religion, with its own theology, its own morality, its own symbolism, which will be, in effect, a "people's religion."