An open frontier imagined by restless pioneers. A bleeding back punished by Lenten mortification. A troubled soul leaning over the anxious bench. John Corrigan's groundbreaking book looks over the wide landscape of American religious history with a new dialectic in mind: empty and full. Emptiness is not simply felt but nurtured, imagined, mourned, inculcated, and even welcomed as an individual and communal experience. After his wide-lens introduction of the feeling of emptiness from settlement to the present, he concludes, “In America, the regulation of the feeling of emptiness, the management of that feeling, is accomplished through performance of a multifaceted social drama involving ongoing positioning and repositioning of the Christian in-group vis-à-vis groups perceived as competitors or opponents. The regulating of the feeling of emptiness as a part of the broader dynamics of social differentiation can be observed in groups representing a wide range of Christian ideas and behaviors.” This book then is not only a history of an emotion, but a complex account of group identity and boundary-making, a kind of Rorschach test in which a form of truth emerges in interpreting the shape of darkness against the light.

Robert Bartlett's book is devoted to one question that, at first glance, is deceptively simple: Why Can the Dead do Such Great Things? The question, it turns out, requires an extensive answer in the course of just under 800 pages. They are supported by forty-four pages of bibliography of primary sources, which are quoted with preference in the relatively minimal footnotes (something the general readership will note with gratitude), and fifty-five pages that list the secondary literature (whose existence will gladden the hearts of the scholarly readers) that constitute the foundation of this scholarly edifice, although—very reasonably—only sparingly quoted.

This essay investigates the roles of Billy Sunday's staff during his urban revivals in the 1910s, especially the committees and departments they administered. Understanding this revival organization is central to understanding Sunday's success. A corporate organization not only allowed Sunday's team to reach urban populations, it also put evangelicalism culturally in step with the times. This committee structure made outpourings of the Holy Spirit predictable and even guaranteed, and it helped Sunday create a revivalism for an age of mass production, one that was palatable to a cross-class and nationwide audience and reproducible in cities across the country. Most scholars of American religion are familiar with the outline of Sunday's career, but the labors of his staff and their contributions remain virtually unexplored. Further, there is a looming historiographical problem with how scholars treat Sunday. His most important years as a revivalist were in the 1910s, before the fundamentalist movement began, but his name is virtually synonymous with fundamentalism. This article challenges scholars to interpret Progressive Era evangelicals not in terms of what they became in the 1920s, but in terms of how they shaped and were shaped by an era of urbanization and consumer capitalism.

In 1863, Sarah Josepha Hale rejoiced that after a decades-long campaign, Thanksgiving had become a national holiday. Hale was not alone in her desire to unite patriotism with spiritual devotion. In her personal correspondence with the president, Eliza Gurney also spoke of the blessings God had bestowed on the nation. Gurney, a devoted Quaker, had met with Lincoln in 1861 to give him spiritual comfort and had continued writing with him ever since. After his public proclamation of Thanksgiving, Gurney wrote to him to demonstrate her “cordial approval of thy late excellent proclamation appointing a day of thanksgiving” despite the fact that as a Quaker she did “not set apart especial seasons for returning thanks.” Gurney saw the holiday as an effective means of making less devout Americans conscious of their God-given blessings and thus supported the federal holiday even while she refused to celebrate it.

The title of Robert Bartlett's book on saints, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, comes from Saint Augustine, who thought of heaven as a preeminently social environment. It is thus easy to entertain a fantasy about a conversation among saints in heaven. One saint boasts that his feast day has a higher liturgical ranking than the others'. This provokes a second saint to point out that the first may have a grand feast day, but is not, like himself, the subject of a properly papal canonization. A third saint is proud of his artistic representations. A fourth points out that he is so important that he is mentioned in Robert Bartlett's latest book. But this boast backfires. All the saints burst into laughter. As one of them points out, “That's nothing special—we're all in Bartlett's book! He didn't miss any of us!”

I first encountered the work of John Corrigan in graduate school. Catherine L. Albanese had assigned his book Business of the Heart in a seminar I was taking. I loved the book, but also felt troubled by it. It focused on religious revivals, a topic I was very interested in. But his approach to revival was clearly not my approach to revival. Corrigan used a mid-nineteenth century religious awakening to offer a compelling and innovative look at a subject I had never considered historically—emotions. Corrigan was asking different questions of his sources than I did, and as a result, he came to very different conclusions than I would have.

The War of 1812 ignited a fierce debate in New York about the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizens in wartime. Two counties in the Upper Hudson River Valley (Rensselaer and Columbia) openly revolted against Governor Daniel D. Tompkins's draft of local militiamen. In September 1812, opponents of the war met in a countywide assembly where they declared the federal draft of the New York militia an “assumption of power, unwarranted by the constitution, [and] dangerous to the rights and privileges of the good people of this state.” The assembly further resolved to defy the governor's detachment order, and as a result, less than a third of the 860 militiamen drafted from Columbia and Rensselaer Counties appeared at the designated rendezvous points. Within weeks, the governor convened the first of three courts-martial to prosecute militiamen “who failed, neglected or refused to obey the orders of the commander in Chief of the said State.” As late as 1818, the New York State legislature insisted upon making a “salutary example” of men who “disregard the voice of duty and the requisitions of law.”

In the nineteenth century, the Mormons were a minority religious group living on the fringes of the United States in both a geographic and social sense. Yet, in the twenty-first century, historians are increasingly realizing that the history of this marginal religious “other” sheds a great deal of light on the American past broadly conceived. This essay briefly describes an important moment in early Mormon history that illuminates our developing understanding of religious liberty in the early American republic, and the political obstacles Americans outside mainstream protestant Christianity faced in their efforts to obtain equal treatment under the law as American citizens.

Robert Bartlett's book on the cult of saints in the Middle Ages clearly constitutes a major achievement. Its scope is vast; its approach ranges from the chronological to the thematic; it embraces many cultural, as well as theological and religious, aspects of the subject. Finally, it is informed by a rich comparative vision that includes wide-ranging discussion of other religions.

In Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America, John Corrigan delivers a sweeping study of the dialectic between emptiness and fullness in American Christianities. He draws from an impressive breadth of sources both over time and within different forms of American Christianity to explore how Christians have integrated the feelings of emptiness and, in turn fullness, as central to their identities, beliefs and practices. At the outset of the book Corrigan explains, “The practice of Christianity that was grounded in the feeling of emptiness, however, was not ambiguous. Christians determinedly chased the feeling of emptiness, valorized it as a longing for God, and performed devotions to prompt and deepen it.” He unpacks this argument in five chapters devoted to feelings, bodies, spaces, times, and believers.

As I read Corrigan's book over the last few months, I encountered it on several occasions with an acute sense of displacement. The margins of my copy are filled with notes reflecting the strange feelings that come from reading a book about emptiness on the #1 train between 225th Street and 66th Street in New York. Each day, as my fellow subway riders and I jam aboard the increasingly-crowded train, we struggle to settle ourselves in acceptable spots; eventually and inevitably this means our bodies find an uneasy peace in a space directly touching those alongside us—legs bumping legs, shoulders touching shoulders, arms along arms. At some points along the journey, this fragile détente of human bodies is prone to crumble; would-be riders barrel aboard, leveraging themselves inside despite slamming subway doors, loud indecipherable admonitions over the P.A., and the muttered protests of those already occupying some portion of the space the newcomers need. For a few weeks I took this trip with Emptiness in tow and I marveled, huddling in my designated square feet and leaning over the book on my lap, as the men, women, and children of New York's west side struggled to find just enough emptiness to enable them to get to work.

I am very grateful to the three discussants, not only, of course, for having agreeable things to say about the book, but also for the way they have used their reflections on the subject to extend and develop it.

My office is the antithesis of emptiness. I am not sure how many books I have managed to cram into a 9 by 12 room, but suffice it to say I have used every available space, even to the point of violating the university's fire code. A year ago, when the fire marshal came around for a routine inspection, he informed me that I could not stack books all the way to the ceiling on top of 6-foot bookshelves but had to leave at least 12 inches' clearance. He told me he would be back for a repeat inspection in a couple of months. This forced me to do some culling—an excruciating task. So over spring break, I reluctantly downsized. Though every book now stood properly upright on a shelf, there was not an inch left anywhere in which to fit even one more volume.