Church in the Wild

Evangelicals today may be relatively out of tune with the environment and sanguine about what is happening to it. But as Brett Grainger shows in this timely work, they have not always been insensitive to communications from nature...Succeeds wonderfully in conveying the emotional engagement with nature experienced by antebellum evangelicals and the sparkling quality of their religiosity.-- (09/01/2019) Readers discover a portrait of early American lived religion that centers [on] the great outdoors. If we have often ceded the natural world to histories of unorthodox, elite seekers such as the New England Transcendentalists, we lose sight of a wider range of religious and cultural experiences in which religious people made sense of their surroundings.-- (07/25/2019) Grainger...demonstrates in his trenchant debut that the American spiritualist origin story of Transcendentalists seeking the divine in the woods and fields doesn't hold up...Readers of American history and Christian theology will enjoy Grainger's history, and fans of Emerson and Thoreau will find much to intrigue and challenge them.--Publishers Weekly (03/01/2019) While we sometimes attribute an enlightened ecology to the New England Puritans, [Grainger] shows how the many millions of evangelicals of the same period had a similar sensibility. The book shows what an approach to religion that strays from the titanic intellectuals and texts can do. In lieu of a rereading of Thoreau, Grainger offers us a fine-grained account of the hymns, sermons, and poetry that constituted the commonsense worldview of a people.-- (03/04/2019) This elegant book uncovers the vital piety at the heart of modern nature spirituality. Grainger provides a deeply intellectual and profoundly feeling portrait of evangelical romanticism.--Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion In this extraordinary book, Brett Grainger writes beautifully about how antebellum evangelicals saw 'field, forest, and stream' as suffused with the immediate presence of Christ. Church in the Wild convincingly argues that nature spirituality was as much an everyday practice for evangelicals as Bible piety. Readers will come away from this profound reinterpretation with a changed understanding of evangelicals as practitioners of outdoor worship, natural theology, and vital piety.--Lincoln A. Mullen, author of The Chance of Salvation Brett Grainger's Church in the Wild is tremendously exciting work, both in the stories it tells and the ways it tells them. Grainger shows the impossibility of separating theology and devotion, learned discourse and popular practice, and--even more fundamentally--evangelical Christianity and the myriad other religious and secular domains from which it acquires new vocabularies, concepts, and practices.--Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays Church in the Wild makes the surprising revelation that nineteenth-century evangelicals were key to the spiritualization of nature in the United States. This is an extraordinary book about the American desire to find God in the natural world.--Catherine Brekus, author of Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America