"Can you draw a clear line through American history from the Puritans to the "Nones" of today? On the surface, there is not much connective tissue between the former, who often serve as shorthand for a persistent religious fanaticism in the United States, and the almost one quarter of the population who now regularly check the "None" or "None of the above" box when responding to surveys of religious preference. But instead of seeing a disconnect between these two groups separated by time, historian Catherine Albanese insists there is a deep connection that spans the centuries. With a targeted romp through American history from the seventeenth century to the present, Albanese ties together these seemingly disparate groups through a shared and distinctively American preoccupation with delight and desire. Albanese begins our journey with the role of delight and desire in the brand of Calvinism championed by renowned Puritan minister Cotton Mather and later Jonathan Edwards. She then traces the development of these themes up through the present, treating the reader to revelatory readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Elizabeth Towne, and others, revealing the contours of an evolving theology of desire. The result is an original and entertaining take on an underexamined through line in American history"--

Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and geographies, the Brill Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling presents modern spirit possession in a variety of contexts. Weaving together the interrelated movements of Spiritualism along with its specific Franco and Latin American currents, articles explore the nineteenth-century beginnings of séances and trance mediumship. Channelling, an heir to Spiritualism begun in the 1970s and still flourishing today, is brought into direct conversation with its predecessors with a view to showing both continuity and disjuncture as the products of new cultural and religious needs. The Brill Handbook marks the first extensive collection on these two interrelated movements and examines themes such as gender, race, performance, and technology in each instance.

The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, which contains over 400 entries by nearly 300 authors, provides an account of philosophical thought in the United States and Canada between 1600 and 1860. The label of "philosopher" has been broadly applied in this Dictionary to intellectuals who have made philosophical contributions regardless of academic career or professional title. Most figures were not academic philosophers, as few such positions existed then, but they did work on philosophical issues and explored philosophical questions involved in such fields as pedagogy, rhetoric, the arts, history, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, anthropology, religion, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. Each entry begins with biographical and career information, and continues with a discussion of the subject's writings, teaching, and thought. A cross-referencing system refers the reader to other entries. The concluding bibliography lists significant publications by the subject, posthumous editions and collected works, and further reading about the subject.