Secularism In Antebellum America

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Secularism in Antebellum America

Author : John Lardas Modern
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226533255
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularism in Antebellum America by : John Lardas Modern

Download or read book Secularism in Antebellum America written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Secularism in Antebellum America

Author : John Lardas Modern
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226533239
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularism in Antebellum America by : John Lardas Modern

Download or read book Secularism in Antebellum America written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, sex machines - these are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this pioneering account of religion and society in 19th-century America.

Secularism in Antebellum America

Author : John Lardas Modern
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226325132
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (251 download)

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Book Synopsis Secularism in Antebellum America by : John Lardas Modern

Download or read book Secularism in Antebellum America written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

Neuromatic

Author : John Lardas Modern
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022679962X
Total Pages : 443 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Neuromatic by : John Lardas Modern

Download or read book Neuromatic written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story Modern tells ranges from eighteenth-century brain anatomies to the MRI; from the spread of phrenological cabinets and mental pieties in the nineteenth century to the discovery of the motor cortex and the emergence of the brain wave as a measurable manifestation of cognition; from cybernetic research into neural networks and artificial intelligence to the founding of brain-centric religious organizations such as Scientology; from the deployments of cognitive paradigms in electric shock treatment to the work of Barbara Brown, a neurofeedback pioneer who promoted the practice of controlling one's own brainwaves in the 1970s. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the 'religion' it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. Nowhere are science and religion closer than when they try to exclude each other, at their own peril"--

The Struggle for America's Soul

Author : Robert Wuthnow
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780802804693
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (46 download)

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Book Synopsis The Struggle for America's Soul by : Robert Wuthnow

Download or read book The Struggle for America's Soul written by Robert Wuthnow and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1989 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the schism between the religious right and mainstream Protestantism, the separation of church and state, and the relationship between science and religion.

Secular Revelations

Author : Mitchell MELTZER
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674040945
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Revelations by : Mitchell MELTZER

Download or read book Secular Revelations written by Mitchell MELTZER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States Constitution is a quintessentially political document. Yet, until now, no one has seriously considered the formative influence of this document on American cultural life. In this ambitious book, Mitchell Meltzer demonstrates the extent to which the Constitution is both source and inspiration for America's greatest literary masterworks.

Awash in a Sea of Faith

Author : Jon Butler
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674056015
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (56 download)

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Book Synopsis Awash in a Sea of Faith by : Jon Butler

Download or read book Awash in a Sea of Faith written by Jon Butler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.

America's God

Author : Mark A. Noll
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199882231
Total Pages : 637 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (998 download)

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Book Synopsis America's God by : Mark A. Noll

Download or read book America's God written by Mark A. Noll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-03 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.

Evangelical Gotham

Author : Kyle B. Roberts
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022638814X
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Evangelical Gotham by : Kyle B. Roberts

Download or read book Evangelical Gotham written by Kyle B. Roberts and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kyle Roberts explores the role of evangelical religion in the making of antebellum New York City and its spiritual marketplace. Between the American Revolution and the War of 1812a period of rebuilding after seven years of British occupationevangelicals emphasized individual conversion and rapidly expanded the number of their congregations. Then, up to the Panic of 1837, evangelicals shifted their focus from their own salvation to that of their neighbors, through the use of domestic missions, Seamen s Bethels, tract publishing, free churches, and abolitionism. Finally, in the decades before the Civil War, the city s dramatic expansion overwhelmed evangelicals, whose target audiences shifted, building priorities changed, and approaches to neighborhood and ethnicity evolved. By that time, though, evangelicals and the city had already shaped each other in profound ways, with New York becoming a national center of evangelicalism."

Awkward Rituals

Author : Dana W. Logan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226818500
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

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Book Synopsis Awkward Rituals by : Dana W. Logan

Download or read book Awkward Rituals written by Dana W. Logan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

Make Yourselves Gods

Author : Peter Coviello
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022647447X
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Make Yourselves Gods by : Peter Coviello

Download or read book Make Yourselves Gods written by Peter Coviello and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.

Domestic Intimacies

Author : Brian Connolly
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812209850
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Domestic Intimacies by : Brian Connolly

Download or read book Domestic Intimacies written by Brian Connolly and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it is commonly thought that incest has been taboo throughout history, nineteenth-century Americans evinced a great cultural anxiety that the prohibition was failing. Theologians debated the meaning and limits of biblical proscription, while jurists abandoned such injunctions and invented a new prohibition organized around the nuclear family. Novelists crafted fictional tales of accidental incest resulting from the severed ties between public and private life, while antislavery writers lamented the ramifications of breaking apart enslaved families. Phrenologists and physiologists established reproduction as the primary motivation of the incest prohibition while naturalizing the incestuous eroticism of sentimental family affection. Ethnographers imagined incest as the norm in so-called primitive societies in contrast to modern civilization. In the absence of clear biological or religious limitations, the young republic developed numerous, varied, and contradictory incest prohibitions. Domestic Intimacies offers a wide-ranging, critical history of incest and its various prohibitions as they were defined throughout the nineteenth century. Historian Brian Connolly argues that at the center of these convergent anxieties and debates lay the idea of the liberal subject: an autonomous individual who acted on his own desires yet was tempered by reason, who enjoyed a life in public yet was expected to find his greatest satisfaction in family and home. Always lurking was the need to exercise personal freedom with restraint; indeed, the valorization of the affectionate family was rooted in its capacity to act as a bulwark against licentiousness. However it was defined, incest was thus not only perceived as a threat to social stability; it also functioned to regulate social relations—within families and between classes as well as among women and men, slaves and free citizens, strangers and friends. Domestic Intimacies overturns conventional histories of American liberalism by placing the fear of incest at the heart of nineteenth-century conflicts over public life and privacy, kinship and individualism, social contracts and personal freedom.

Credulity

Author : Emily Ogden
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022653247X
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Credulity by : Emily Ogden

Download or read book Credulity written by Emily Ogden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World

Author : John Corrigan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022631393X
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Religious Intolerance, America, and the World by : John Corrigan

Download or read book Religious Intolerance, America, and the World written by John Corrigan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence. Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

Going Low

Author : Finbarr Curtis
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231556136
Total Pages : 134 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Going Low by : Finbarr Curtis

Download or read book Going Low written by Finbarr Curtis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberalism puts its trust in civil discourse and rational argument. Today, its opponents enthusiastically flout these norms, making a show of defying so-called political correctness. In the Trump era and beyond, right-wing figures delight in sheer offensiveness. What is at stake in breaking the rules of civility to “own the libs”? Going Low examines how the offensive style of contemporary politics challenges liberal democratic institutions. Considering the rise of illiberal politics and debates about the limits of free speech, Finbarr Curtis draws on the insights of religious studies to rethink provocation and transgression. He argues that the spectacle of brazenly violating taboos is a show of dominance over a supposedly censorious liberalism. Profaning liberal pieties is the ultimate form of “winning.” Curtis contends that deliberate offensiveness dovetails with the privatization of public goods: both represent the refusal to accommodate the sensibilities of others in a diverse society. Going Low offers a series of essays that recast recent controversies, including Trump’s reality-TV presidency, white evangelical complaints of liberal bigotry, bakers who refuse to bake cakes for LGBTQ weddings, and hostility toward the activism of athletes and college students. Together, these essays shed new light on contemporary political discourse and reveal why illiberalism has turned to profane politics for a profane age.

Culture and Redemption

Author : Tracy Fessenden
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691049632
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (496 download)

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Book Synopsis Culture and Redemption by : Tracy Fessenden

Download or read book Culture and Redemption written by Tracy Fessenden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

This Life

Author : Martin Hägglund
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 1101873736
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis This Life by : Martin Hägglund

Download or read book This Life written by Martin Hägglund and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.