In Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America, John Corrigan delivers a sweeping study of the dialectic between emptiness and fullness in American Christianities. He draws from an impressive breadth of sources both over time and within different forms of American Christianity to explore how Christians have integrated the feelings of emptiness and, in turn fullness, as central to their identities, beliefs and practices. At the outset of the book Corrigan explains, “The practice of Christianity that was grounded in the feeling of emptiness, however, was not ambiguous. Christians determinedly chased the feeling of emptiness, valorized it as a longing for God, and performed devotions to prompt and deepen it.”Footnote ⁵ He unpacks this argument in five chapters devoted to feelings, bodies, spaces, times, and believers.

This highly creative and thought-provoking study encourages the reader to wonder about the balance that he argues many Christians held between a sense of emptiness and a desire for fullness. Is this simply a helpful metaphor to organize disparate material over time and among different groups, or is it an essential category for understanding American Christianity? I was overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of research that went into this book and Corrigan's ability to corral wildly different primary sources into a comprehensible narrative. This book will undoubtedly serve as the landmark study on American Christianity and emotion that will motivate future scholarship. I can imagine studies inspired by any of these chapters that will further investigate single issues raised by Corrigan and take them in new directions. That is the true value of a sweeping study; it opens up future scholarship by breaking in a new path.

In that spirit, I would like to focus on chapter 2, “Body,” and raise a few questions and perhaps some suggestions for scholars who might like to build on what is already an important argument about the dialectic between emptiness and fullness in American Christians' bodies. Throughout the chapter I was primarily struck by the question: whose bodies? When Corrigan discusses appetite, desires, bloodletting, weeping, sex, and silence, I kept wondering about the specificity of bodies. On the one hand I am overjoyed by the attention to any bodies and the seriousness with which he takes bodily practices as integral to Christian spirituality. But on the other hand, there is so much that is missed in a survey of bodies in general. The particularities of individual bodily experiences of emptiness and fullness is surely an area for further investigation. And here I do not mean simply adding in examples of female bodies, or slave bodies, or children's bodies, or intersections or all three. Corrigan is careful to include many types of bodies in this chapter. What I mean is the examination of how emptiness for an immigrant Christian child's body might, for example, have different theological and practical meanings than for, say, a puritan divine. Fasting as a devotional practice clearly takes on different social and theological meaning for female bodies that are starving for salvation not just in Christian terms but also in American cultural terms. The attention to fasting and food that is put into Mormon bodies is not simply about curbing physical passions and preparing for a blessing but also is related to unique views of bodily resurrection not held by other Christians. In other words, particular bodies have particular experiences of feeling Christian in America.

Let me focus more specifically on the subcategory of bloodletting that Corrigan relates to fasting as a purposeful loss. He notes in the contemporary world, primarily among young women, eating disorders and the practice of cutting or self-mutilation are often related. For Christian women, Corrigan observes, food and blood are related to feelings of being empty and full. Corrigan carries the theme of bloodletting to practices of medieval religious disciplining of the flesh and the recent protestant fascination with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Then it is on to the Civil War and Don Mathews's provocative and important study of blood sacrifice and lynching. Corrigan pulls all of these examples together by explaining that “because Christian notions about emptiness were intertwined with ideas about fullness, thinking about bleeding the body eventually was joined to ideas about filling it with new blood.”Footnote ⁶ Yes, but whose bleeding body? There is something very seductive about this overarching narrative that is filled with examples from many places and times all adding up to a coherent feeling of either emptiness or fullness. But as I read through this chapter I thought about my own feelings of blood and where a spiritual diary I might pen would fit into the analysis. Would I experience blood with feelings of emptiness or fullness? What about feelings of power, or strength, or vitality? Does this dialectic adequately reflect most Christians' experiences of blood? While I do not dispute that the practice of bloodletting and the metaphor of bloodletting resonate deeply with Christians, I cannot forget that female Christians spend the majority of their life managing blood. What type of theological understandings might be connected to their monthly experiences of bloodletting? I am reminded of Pamela Klassen's outstanding review of Gil Anidjar's book Blood published in Marginalia.Footnote ⁷ In it she notes that his examination of blood in Christianity pays little attention to female bodies experiences of blood and argues that his interpretation might be different if he wrote from that perspective. Klassen writes, “For millennia most women between the ages of about twelve and fifty-five have thought with blood on a regular basis, reading its monthly overflowing presence or signal absence with anxiety, pleasure, or forebearance. When blood's absence becomes fertility, a pregnant woman reads blood in a new way, depending on whether she wants to bear a child or not. Once she gives birth, the blood comes again; for centuries this was the most dangerous time in the life of a woman, as the blood could come so forcefully that it would kill her.” Bloodletting might be a useful category for thinking about emptiness and fullness but the experience of losing and gaining blood is neither universal nor uniform among Christians. If the sources do not bear out women speaking of blood in terms of fullness and emptiness, perhaps this metaphor does not represent their experiences. The meaning of blood for female Christians connected to the dialectic of emptiness and fullness would be an excellent area for future scholarship. This is just one example of how any segment of these five rich chapters could be mined for further investigation and interpretation.

Overall I found this book to be an ambitious and original study that ably demonstrates the centrality of emotion for the study of Christianity in the United States. I wish to thank John Corrigan for writing this terrific book.