Religious history has tended to focus on Churches and other religious institutions, and on fully articulated belief statements such as theological treatises. In more recent years it has followed the trend of social history, trying to capture human experience by looking at ordinary religious life outside the confines of Churches, denominations and other standard religious institutions. This book, developing out of a dissertation prepared in a department of religious studies, furthers this scholarship. The author insists that work, that is everyday working life, must be integrated into our understanding of religion. His case study concerns the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky, surely one of the grittiest (literally) and toughest working environments imaginable. Callahan surveys not just the religion but the entire lives of Kentucky coal miners. He follows them from their backgrounds (usually) as subsistence farmers in the isolated Highlands to their attraction to but also suspicion of what they called ‘public work’, meaning wage work to supplement the family income. As the railroads penetrated eastern Kentucky (leading to the spread of ‘railroad religion’, the mountaineers' term for denominations such as the Southern Baptist and Southern Methodist Churches), and as lands fell under the control of coal companies, men who previously farmed increasingly coal mined. They lived in company towns in company houses, shopped in company stores, and often worshipped in heavily company-subsidised churches. Many miners moved into Holiness/Pentecostal Churches; for them, religion was a form of work – work necessary to gain and keep their salvation in the midst of the world into which ‘public’ work brought them (p. 156). Initial efforts at unionisation in the early 1930s, led by Communist-backed unions, failed when the views of the union leaders (including atheism and racial egalitarianism) were disseminated, but John Lewis (seen by many as a Christ-like figure) and the United Mine Workers later had some success in ameliorating the harshest aspects of the miners' existence. Callahan's insistence on integrating work (which, after all, is what most people do most of the time for all their lives) into religious expression is laudable, and one hopes that others will follow his lead. At times, the connection between work and religion here is strangely abstract, as in the notion that the emphasis on bodily experience in Holiness ‘offered an idiom through which to engage the hard and dangerous physical labor of mining’ (p. 196). The older Churches of Appalachian mountain religion (mostly independent ‘Hardshell’ Baptist) are strangely absent from the text. None the less, Callahan's hard labour has excavated some rich analytical mines and cut a path into subterranean but vital dimensions of religious experience in America.