American Religious Liberalism. Edited by Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. xii + 416 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)American Religious Liberalism . Edited by Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey . Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2012. xii + 416 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesAlmost four decades ago William Hutchison wrote the then-definitive work on "the modernist impulse" in American religious life. He viewed religious liberalism through the lens of intellectual history and focused exclusively on the nation's Protestant theological heritage. Not surprisingly, Hutchison framed liberal religion as the way that certain progressive ideas long-grown in Protestant theology guided those adjusting to the defining features of a dawning modernity (for example, science, biblical scholarship).Leigh Schmidt and Sally Promey set out to explore the broad diversity of American religious liberalism free from the categories that constrained Hutchison's vision of this fluid spiritual impulse. To do this they invited sixteen scholars to contribute original essays exploring topics that might be broadly characterized as 1) spirituality in the arts, 2) the agendas born of religious cosmopolitanism, and 3) interactions between religious and secular forms of liberalism.It is somewhat ironic that many of the strongest essays in the collection echo at least parts of Hutchison's basic take on the liberal strain of American religious thought. Christopher White, for example, tells the fascinating story of artist Juliet Thompson. Living in an era when Christian claims to superiority were undermined by increased interreligious contact and modern biblical scholarship, Thompson discovered the universalist message of the Baha'i' faith en route to discovering an artistic style enabling her to experience a spiritual presence through material forms. Matthew Hedstrom's article in the book's second section shows that the push for greater interfaith connections led many Americans beyond religious parochialism to a cosmopolitan faith that dissolved fixed orthodoxies. Hedstrom focuses on the wide reading audiences for books that John Dewey described as written "for the people who feel inarticulately that they have the essence of the religious with them and yet are repelled by the religion and are confused" (221). Bestselling books, many promoted by the Religious Book Club, provided new vocabularies that rendered personal faith consistent with the latest scientific thinking and sensitivity to cross-cultural diversity. Yaakov Ariel's essay on Jewish liberalism similarly understands Reform Judaism in terms of the same impulses Hutchison and others discern in liberal Protestantism such as embracing the idea of progress, affirming scientific discoveries, and incorporating higher criticism of the Bible.An insight developed through several of the book's essays has to do with the role that metaphysical religion has played in historical expressions of American religious liberalism. Whereas intellectual historians typically focus on "highbrow" sources of theology, the decidedly "middlebrow" philosophies associated with western esotericism and New Thought have played important roles in stretching Americans' ontological imaginations in ways that encourage theological innovation. …