Locked in a Swiss bank since Jung's death in 1961, the Red Book was made public only after a lengthy campaign by Jung's professional heirs. While Jungians see the book as a seminal text for understanding their teacher's legacy, Jung's descendants have worried how its strange illustrations and trippy text will reflect on their already provocative paterfamilias. For those who cannot see the actual book, which also will be exhibited in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., a "meticulously reproduced facsimile"—now in its fifth printing—was published in October.

Jung has much to say to our era, a moment when—as the Pew Forum reported last week—almost half of us have had a religious or mystical experience. It's not surprising that evangelicals, whether black or white, are most likely to have had such an awakening but it's the responses among the unaffiliated that are most striking. Three in ten of this cohort have had a "mystical experience," and while half of this number are simply "religiously unaffiliated" (aka "spiritual but not religious"), almost 20 percent of atheists, agnostics and "nones" also have had a spiritual/mystical encounter.

The pervasive proliferation of media makes this possible. Just as the printing press revolutionized the ways in which everyday folks could encounter the Bible, our ubiquitous access to TV, films and the Internet has radically rearranged our relationship both to spiritual narratives and one another. We can create, deconstruct and reassemble everything from the Bhagavad-Gita to the Scroll of Pythia—and share it with millions of others. Jung's Red Book deals with the former text; we can only wonder what he would have done with the latter (or with online forums like Friendster and Facebook).

New media platforms and social media have the capacity to make the old new and the new old. Will the Glo Bible speak to a new generation of media-savvy seekers, making Christianity cutting-edge in the same way that the Jesus Movement did for their boomer parents and grandparents? Or are teens and twenty-somethings more likely to be touched by the Armageddon-by-way-of-bioengineering epic at the heart of Dollhouse?

Exploring social trends and human behavior—how and why people seek meaning, connection and identity—is a key angle of religion coverage. But religionists, like all beat reporters, tend to track leaders, institutions and conflicts. That's part of the story, but it also misses the quirks, mystics and everyday practices that shape the beliefs and behaviors reflected in surveys like Pew's. We know about bricks and mortar—from the latest at Saddleback Church to the decline of the mainline. But some of the most important, intriguing and illuminating spiritual searches—like Jung's Red Book—are often hidden from the public eye.
 
Diane Winston