This collection of twelve essays takes up the rubric of theory and practice to produce a cultural history of religious practices. The contributors assess how American Protestants have attempted to excavate certain practices as a means of recovering and asserting an “authentic” Christian identity. The branding of religions as “lived” and “practiced,” of course, constructs a logically necessary counterpart—religions that are not lived and practiced—that seems, well, illogical. But of course, this language of lived religion is rooted in the recent shift toward elucidating how modern Western religions look “on the ground” (that is, as popular religion). And this historiographical shift itself is largely the result of the ethnographic gaze of Western observers finally turning in upon the West itself. For this reason, the volume may be appropriately understood as a response to Robert Orsi's work on American Catholicism as lived religion.

The volume proceeds from the imperatives of practice theorists such as Catherine Bell and Pierre Bourdieu, who have recognized practice or ritual as fundamentally a social technology of discipline and control. In addition, however, because the editors clearly aim to incorporate a “practical” approach to practice theory (they identify theologians such as Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass as key influences), they also attempt to render what is redemptive about religious practice as a category of “enabling” phenomena (4). In addition, the editors have emphasized chronology in the arrangement of the essays. As they explain in the introduction, the editors recognize the usefulness of thematic approaches but have prioritized chronology in order to preserve the interest of rendering an account of how institutions and meanings have evolved in particular historical contexts. To this end, the editors have organized the essays into four major sections: Puritan and Evangelical Practice in New England, 1630–1800; Mission, Nation, and Christian Practice, 1820–1940; Devotional Practices and Modern Predicaments, 1880–1920; and Liberal Protestants and Universalizing Practices, 1850–1965.

One essay, by Heather Curtis, examines the trope of “acting faith” in order to explain how the nineteenth-century faith healing movement among Protestants interfaced with gender ideologies and reticence over the proper role of individual human agency within a theology of healing as a phenomenon of divine agency. “Acting faith” meant that those desiring to be healed were literally to get out of bed and walk around as if they were already healed; this active disposition manifested a theology of healing based on individual initiative. Curtis locates the controversies generated by this approach within a contest of ideals concerning passivity (should the believer play an active role in healing?) and domesticity (did reliance upon the power of God undermine the virility and potency of manhood?).

Another essay, by Anthea Butler, situates discipline of the body within the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) as the primary set of practices for understanding life in the Sanctified churches. Departing from the typical focus on the ecstatic practices of COGIC, Butler argues that COGIC embraced the regulated body as a tool of worship and as the basis for constructing a sacred world of meanings. Fasting, forbidding the intake of alcohol and cigarettes, abstaining from extramarital sex, vigorous prayer (often lasting through early morning hours)—all were practices that regulated bodies in order to differentiate them from the non-Sanctified and to create a form of power that could bridge spiritual and temporal worlds. Butler goes on to explain how popular appropriations of Holiness practices such as Mahalia Jackson's charismatic style of singing disrupted the boundary between “Saints” and “the world.”

Leigh Schmidt demonstrates a more extensive notion of practice through assessing Thomas Wentworth Higginson's efforts to advance a “sympathy of religions.” By this he refers to the nineteenth-century ideology of religious pluralism promoted by the Free Religious Association and largely animated by the writings of Higginson. Schmidt convincingly explains how a theology of religion that could include and affirm all religions required a moral practice—a rigor of representation rooted in fundamental judgments about the worth of “other” religions—that is fruitfully analyzed as a practice of piety.

Mormon and Protestant missionary practices in the Pacific are the subject of Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp's essay. By contrasting missions by Protestants and Latter-day Saints in the Pacific Islands, Maffly-Kipp demonstrates the relationship between the colonial dimensions of nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism and the ideology of religious, cultural, and racial supremacy. The crux of her analysis concerns the way these notions compelled American missionaries to focus on establishing an apartheid society and eradicating the cultural practices of Hawaiians and Tahitians even more urgently than beliefs (although Mormon missionaries were at times more accommodating toward native practices). This, in turn, stimulated a reciprocal focus on the quotidian actions of missionaries themselves as boundary markers between savage and civilized, heathen and Christian.

Other contributors to the volume examine practices such as journal writing, forgiveness, the honoring of elders, the nurturing of nationalism, architectural renewal, prayer, dance, and visual art. The fact that such a broad array of practices is examined as religious ritual further undergirds the editors' explicit efforts to intervene theoretically into conceptualizing the category. All the essays are grounded in primary research and compellingly support clear theses that portray Protestant practices as regulating and inhibiting religious subjects while also supporting and enabling a productive exercise of identity and subjectivity. By delivering a well-crafted coherence, the essays indicate equally well the theoretical currents that have shaped this volume, especially the maxim that Protestant Christianity, despite claims to the contrary, comprises immense concern for right actions and ritual, not merely beliefs. The result is a very readable and theoretically astute collection of essays that brings to light valuable conclusions drawn from original research. Readers will easily appreciate the value of this volume for teaching and research.