Sara Paretsky is world-renowned as the author of private-eye novels set in Chicago, featuring the redoubtable V. I. Warshawski. But she first came to Chicago to work in the civil rights movement, and she stayed on to take a PhD in American history at the University of Chicago. After a harsh struggle that fulfilled the nasty reputation that university then had (I trailed Parestsky by three years and was warned away from accepting an offer from Chicago), she won her degree in 1977. This is her dissertation, published nearly forty years later.

Given this background, two questions immediately arise. What are the merits of a book published (seemingly without revision) after such a long hiatus? And how might its themes comport with the subsequent career of the author's lifetime work, V. I. Warshawski?

As to its merits, Words, Works & Ways of Knowing tells an important story that needs to be recovered in our own time even more than in the 1970s. The book undertakes a close, sound analysis of the scholarly enterprise carried on at Andover Theological Seminary from its founding in 1807 to the Civil War. The school began (chap. 1) as an orthodox Calvinist bastion to counteract Unitarian Harvard and to generate ministers and missionaries for the American and global frontiers. It discovered scholarship (chap. 2) as an effective weapon against theological liberalism largely by way of Moses Stuart's work in the field of Old Testament philology. Then, in the quarter century before the Civil War, Stuart's disciples broadened his model into a program of self-consciously Christian scholarship across the entire curriculum (chaps. 3–5). But under their disciples the project unraveled in the quarter century after the war (chap. 6). The author includes a preface situating the work in her own life story, in the process gutting the Father-of-All-Bad-Thesis-Supervisors in words quite at odds with the circumspect acknowledgments of the original dissertation. Finally, Amanda Porterfield supplies an afterword with suggestions on how the work fits in the field today.

Paretsky largely sympathizes with her subjects' intentions and partly with their accomplishments. She accurately faults the established wisdom ca. 1970 by showing that the Unitarian-Calvinist debate did not culminate in a simple triumph of the liberals but launched something of a “Calvinist renaissance” (45) of broad sway and considerable intellectual power. That movement was also more faithfully Christian than the American literary renaissance which eventuated, if at first as a disreputable child, from the Unitarian side. If Andover's leading lights—Edwards A. Park, Bela B. Edwards, Edward Robinson, Edward Hitchcock, and W. G. T. Shedd—do not shine today with the luster of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, et al. (although they did have their own Ralph Emerson, Waldo's distant cousin, as church historian), Paretsky admires how they honored the scholarly enterprise as such and not simply for polemical purposes. She carefully details their engagement with the German scholarship that was pouring forth at the time in such profusion and with such critical acumen as to set the standard for the entire learned world. The Andover circle did not shy away from the challenges to received orthodoxy borne by the German wave nor simply acquiesce to its momentum but tried to differentiate among its assumptions, methods, and conclusions to harvest whatever might build a case for rational Christianity.

So why did this movement, so eminent in its own day, crumble so entirely after the Civil War as to lie forgotten today? It was undone not by interlopers or avowed enemies but by its own heirs when the methods it ordained could no longer support the conclusions it desired. The list of culprits is familiar—geology, Darwin, and higher criticism of the Bible—but the details of Andover's struggle with them are given here with rare nuance and with the manifest implication that such challenges did not have to prove fatal. What was fatal was Andover's unwavering commitment to a program of “moral philosophy” compounded of Scottish (“Common Sense”) Realism, Baconian induction, Paleyite arguments from design, and confidence that “right thought would lead to right belief” (120). That compound was regnant in American higher education in the early nineteenth century, but Andover recommitted to it in the 1840s, just when the creative voices in American theology were apprehending its deep inadequacy. These turned instead to Romantic and Idealist approaches from Germany and Britain. By contrast, Paretsky reveals, Andover never really did come to terms with German historicism, however much it endorsed Leopold van Ranke's empirical historical method. It could not grasp reality as developing, evolving, and therefore requiring a fully contextual hermeneutic. Nor could its neatly benevolent designer God deal with the tribulations of Darwinian data.

Thus, Andover's enterprise hit the wall just before (not well before, as the book's subtitle might imply) the Civil War—just as Oliver Wendell Holmes (not Emerson, pace 135) proclaimed in his “The One-Hoss Shay” of 1858. Amanda Porterfield, in her afterword, says Paretsky's book offers a different interpretation of these matters from that propounded in Mark Noll's America's God (Oxford University Press, 2002). It seems to me more the opposite: Andover's project fell precisely from over-accommodating to the terms of the prevailing culture, per Noll's diagnosis.

And what of V. I. Warshawski? In her preface, Paretsky confesses: “Almost everything I've ever written has been part of this thirst for a vision” both heroic and harmonious (ix). Next, she confesses to having been absorbed with the likes of John Calvin during her undergraduate days. Finally, we can read in her non-Warshawski novel Bleeding Kansas (Putnam Adult, 2008) that Paretsky is taken with the story of evangelical abolitionists—Andover types—who cofounded her native state and of their sufferings at the hands of proslavery terrorists. This puts us in the realm of Marilynne Robinson. She and Paretsky have decidedly different crafts as novelists, but it is not a stretch to see Robinson's hard-bitten latter-day Calvinism mirrored in the hardboiled detective world of V. I. Warshawski. The male version of that world was invented in the 1930s, coincidentally with Reinhold Niebuhr's theology. Andover Seminary ultimately traces back to the analogously neo-Calvinist vision of Jonathan Edwards. To me, V. I. Warshawski is a secular heir to both, a moral woman in an amoral world, still searching out the heart of true virtue, only doing so more convincingly than did Andover's “moral philosophy.”