Contents

• Introduction / Roger Lundin
• Signing off : religious indifference in America / Barbara Packer
• "Rare and delectable places" : Thoreau’s imagination of sacred space at Walden / John Gatta
• Charity and its discontents : pity and politics in Melville’s fiction / Michael Colacurcio
• Nimble believing : Dickinson and the conflict of interpretations / Roger Lundin
• Private interpretations : the defense of slavery, nineteenth- century hermeneutics, and the poetry of Fances E.W. Harper / Katherine Clay Bassard
• Mark Twain’s Lincoln as "man of the border" : religion, free thinking, and the Civil War / Harold K. Bush, Jr
• The liberal saint : American liberalism and the problem of character / M.D. Walhout
• A homemade heaven : modernist poetry and the social gospel / Gail McDonald
• Religion and the environmental imagination in American literature / Lawrence Buell