Newsweek starts its story on Baby boomers and religion this way:
How different would the world be today if George Harrison, the introspective Beatle, hadn't chanced to pick up a sitar during the filming of "Help!" and start plinking away at it? Well, maybe not all that different. But it might have made a difference in the life of Janet Hoffman, who was a college sophomore in 1968 and, while visiting a friend at Berkeley, got dragged to a course in Transcendental Meditation.
The story by Jerry Adler and Julie Scelfo then covers several of the major spiritual movements during the last few decades: Jesus Freaks, The Unification Church, Marharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Mediation, Scientology, the Promise Keepers, Werner Erhard’s est (now Landmark), and Hare Krishna.
They missed a major story: the Institutional Church’s response. The Trappist monks at St. Joseph’s monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts responded to this widespread spiritual seeking by retrieving Christian practices of contemplation and formulating a method known as Centering Prayer.
Centering Prayer is a method of prayer, which prepares us to receive the gift of God's presence, traditionally called contemplative prayer. It consists of responding to the Spirit of Christ by consenting to God’s presence and action within. It furthers the development of contemplative prayer by quieting our faculties to cooperate with the gift of God’s presence.
Centering prayer groups are found in mainstream churches throughout the country.
I'm tempted to put Adler and Scelfo's oversight down to journalisms general ignorance of mainstream religion. In fairness, they were writing a story about alternative spiritual movements in popular culture. Maybe they will do another story on mainstream religion's response, or lack thereof.
Newsweek Misses a Religion Story
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