THE LAW OF DIVINE COMPENSATION

“Finance is just one of the many areas where an increasingly obsolete, materially based worldview is proving inadequate to the challenges of the times in which we live,” writes spiritual activist, teacher and author Williamson (A Course in Weight Loss, 2010, etc.), whose concern about the country’s fragile financial state has her procuring alternative pathways toward a fulfilling livelihood.

Structured around uplifting Catholic dogma, the author provides useful if basic advice certain to reinforce the power of promoting positivity and goodness. To Williamson, qualities as simplistic as an affirmative mindset (inside and outside of the workplace) and self-love can release “an infinite number of possibilities.” The beneficial byproducts of love, self-assurance, faith and a blind allegiance to the universe’s cause-and-effect harmony will surely promote financial and professional success and stability, she writes, while defusing anger, guilt, fear and negativity is the key to moving forward (“miracles will follow”). Williamson refers constantly to A Course in Miracles, a spiritually transformative book series she helped popularize. This, combined with her New-Age enlightenment, results in an ecclesiastical amalgam of magical thinking, great expectations and the kind of fanciful awareness already calcified throughout the author’s best-selling oeuvre. Williamson also presents healing prayers and patented themes of hope and faithful devotion toward becoming financially and professionally sound by following a “path to material abundance through immaterial means.”

Though tribes of believers will again take the author’s classic soothsaying to heart, it’s essentially the same song with slightly different lyrics.