In The Chance of Salvation, Lincoln A. Mullen argues that the proliferation of religious denominations and traditions in the United States in the nineteenth century gradually created a common understanding of “religion as choice” rather than as inheritance (10). The assumption that people had to choose their religion—or irreligion—was the one feature shared by every religious group, and it formed a new kind of religious identity. Mullen explores the history of religious conversion during the period in order to show what that identity looked like. He attends to conversion both as an intense interior change and as a more measured movement back and forth among like-minded Christian denominations, but he is interested mainly in the people who took the path from one religious tradition to another. He looks at Protestants, Cherokee Indians, African Americans, Mormons, Jews, and Catholics and tries to understand the experiences of converts, the agencies of conversion, and the strategies of group self-defense.

This smart book surprises in many ways. Emily Clark uses a wide range of sources to uncover the myth and the reality of women in early New Orleans who fell into the category of one-quarter white, or “quadroon.” Assumed from the nineteenth century into the twentieth to be an exotic and lascivious “fancy lady” whose sexual services had long been available for purchase in the Crescent City, the quadroon in fact has a much shorter history and a more specific provenance than these longstanding presumptions convey. Clark demonstrates that the image of the sexually enticing quadroon stemmed from the reality of unwed black women from revolutionary Saint Domingue, whose marriage prospects in New Orleans were made negligible by the demographic situation in that town. Immigrant women of color from Haiti vastly outnumbered both refugee men and free black men native to New Orleans, and the law prohibited marriage between black women and white men. Dominguan women, who stood little chance of success in the marriage market, brought with them not only a will to survive, but also familiarity with an island custom of housekeeping. In Saint Domingue, a black woman who kept house for a white planter and was entrusted with the workings of the plantation was known as a ménagère. Only sometimes did such women become concubines or common-law wives, whose children might be provided for in their white father's will. More often than not, the work of a ménagère was commonplace and respectable, without necessarily connoting a sexual liaison.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)A tradition is not a consensus; change is not decline; variety does not entail discontinuity; and Calvinism has never been a monolithic system of thought. Wallace, a distinguished member of faculty of George Washington University, has traced history of English Calvinist thought from beginning of Restoration in 1660 until death of Queen Anne in 1714 by analyzing in considerable detail thought of seven Calvinist theologians who exemplified variety of Reformed thought while responding to early Enlightenment modernity. His approach is typological: he identifies five types of Calvinist thought that introduced new dimensions to tradition while remaining within its boundaries. Each represented a defense of tradition against scoffers, enthusiasts, atheists, socinians, deists, and materialists.Peter Sterry (1613-1672), chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, expounded a mystical form of Calvinism. Theophilus Gale (1628-1679), preacher at Winchester Cathedral until his ejection as a dissenter in 1660, combined Calvinist thought with of Hermetic tradition; Joseph Alleine (1634-168), a Presbyterian cleric at Taunton, preached, along with his circle of clerical followers, a form of evangelical Calvinism. Richard Baxter (1615-1691), pastor for many years at Kidderminster, along with William Bates (1625-1699), who held living at St. Dunstans-in-the-West in London, and John Howe (1630-1705), pastor at Torrington, expounded a Calvinist natural theology and used traditional evidences of Christianity to fend off deistic and Socinian thinkers. Finally, John Edwards (1637-1716), parish incumbent at St. Sepulchre's in Cambridge, represented Calvinists who stayed within Church of England while criticizing growing Anglican affection for theological alternatives to Calvinism. Mysticism, ancient theology, evangelicalism, natural theology, and Anglican conformity--the theologians who represented these trajectories all altered traditional Calvinist thought without abandoning it. And each of them represented a response to early modernity. This is guiding theme of Wallace's book.Sterry's mysticism found expression not only in his leanings toward Neoplatonism but also his striving for a consciousness of the immediate or direct presence of God (58). Using images of light and unity and freely allegorizing Bible, Sterry advertised possibility of union between soul and God. Gale, on other hand, attained his reputation for his argument in The Court of Gentiles (1672) that all knowledge, even wisdom of ancient Greeks, and especially all religious knowledge derived from ancient Hebrews. He was particularly fond of Hermetic texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a supposed contemporary of Moses, and he depicted Hermes, along with other figures, some historical and some legendary, as theologians, a practice that went back to second century. Alleine and his circle, on other hand, maintained older Puritan preoccupations with conversion, and Alleine's posthumously published and often re-published Alarm to Converted Sinners (1671) represented turn to inward piety that had also appeared in Pietist and Quietist movements. …

Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation. By Dewey D. WallaceJr. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. x + 358 pp. $74.00 cloth. - Volume 81 Issue 1

In 1966, Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution challenged a longstanding consensus that liberal, Enlightenment thought inspired and guided eighteenth‐century American revolutionaries. Instead, he argued, the impetus for revolution came from anti‐authoritarian and visionary “evangelicals” with a millennial ideology and a vision of social equality. Edmund S. Morgan and Sidney E. Mead replied with dissenting reviews, and in 1970 Bernard Bailyn insisted that it was a “gross simplification to believe that religion as such, or any of its doctrinal elements, had a unique political role in the Revolutionary movement” (“Religion and Revolution: Three Biographical Studies,” Perspectives in American History 4 [1970], p. 85). By 1976, however, Mark A. Noll, Harry S. Stout, Patricia U. Bonomi, and William G. McLoughlin, among others, had begun to advance subtle arguments linking religion to the American Revolution, even while Gordon S. Wood and Jon Butler continued...

Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer (eds.), Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, 29.00). Pp. xiv+409. isbn978 0 226 39004 8. - Volume 44 Issue 1

In 1844, the Congregationalist minister Enoch Pond in Bangor, Maine, reminded his fellow clergy that they had been commissioned not only to feed the sheep of their flocks but also to nurture the lambs. Under no circumstances, he cautioned, would a good minister neglect the children, for both Christian parents and their pastors felt “the deepest anxiety” that the children of American parishes would not “receive that wise government, that faithful discipline, that Christian instruction and restraint, which, by the blessing of God, shall result in their speedy conversion, and bring them early and truly into the fold of Christ.” He called for pastors to pray for the children, to convene meetings of praying parents, to pay attention to children during pastoral visits, to impart special instruction to children from the pulpit, to visit their schools, to institute Sunday schools, to teach children the Bible, and to offer catechetical instruction. The devoted pastor would acquaint himself with children, “enter into their feelings, and interest himself in their affairs; and thus engage their affections, and win their confidence.“Christian clergy in America had long heeded such admonitions. Seventeenth-century Puritan ministers made serious, if sporadic, efforts to teach the catechism, often invited groups of children into their homes for instruction, contended over the implications of the baptismal covenant, and urged parents to teach their offspring religious truths and Christian practices. Eighteenth-century Anglican clergy made similar efforts to instruct children, and their revivalist counter-parts in New England and the Middle Colonies encouraged the conversion of children at younger than customary ages. Jonathan Edwards devoted careful attention to his four-year-old convert Phebe Bartlet, who followed in the path of her converted eleven-year-old brother by announcing, after anguished prayers and cries for mercy, that “the kingdom of God had come” to her.