Hi fraggle friends ^.^
I thought this might be of interest to some of you - Professor Rupert Till, at Huddersfield University here in the UK, has made his chapter from the Bloomsbury Handbook for Religion and Popular Music (ed.Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg, Bloomsbury: London) available to view for free on ResearchGate.
It includes a history of ambient music and its relationship with ancient forms of spirituality, mysticism and religion (i.e. meditation and ecstatic states), and most interestingly from my perspective he explores how ambient music has been positioned at the boundaries between the religious/spiritual and the secular.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318563122_Ambient_Music
If any of you find this interesting/enjoyable please let me know and I'll continue posting similar stuff as I come across it - and I'll be coming across more and more of it as I get further into my PhD
Big love and all good vibrations <3