An open frontier imagined by restless pioneers. A bleeding back punished by Lenten mortification. A troubled soul leaning over the anxious bench. John Corrigan's groundbreaking book looks over the wide landscape of American religious history with a new dialectic in mind: empty and full. Emptiness is not simply felt but nurtured, imagined, mourned, inculcated, and even welcomed as an individual and communal experience. After his wide-lens introduction of the feeling of emptiness from settlement to the present, he concludes, “In America, the regulation of the feeling of emptiness, the management of that feeling, is accomplished through performance of a multifaceted social drama involving ongoing positioning and repositioning of the Christian in-group vis-à-vis groups perceived as competitors or opponents. The regulating of the feeling of emptiness as a part of the broader dynamics of social differentiation can be observed in groups representing a wide range of Christian ideas and behaviors.”Footnote ¹ This book then is not only a history of an emotion, but a complex account of group identity and boundary-making, a kind of Rorschach test in which a form of truth emerges in interpreting the shape of darkness against the light.

Our speakers for the American Society of Church History's panel could not have been better suited to the task of representing the breadth of Corrigan's successive chapters on feeling, body, space, time, and believers. Lightly centered on the ruminations about feeling in chapter 1, Peter Thuesen, Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, uses his own distinguished record of exploring the powerful role of predestination in shaping American worldviews to address the “ultimate emptiness”: death. He sees experience and interpretation of the bitter void of death through the eyes of Mark Twain, whose own losses altered his thinking irrevocably. As Mark Twain writes, notes Thuesen, in his poem “Broken Idols”:

Feelings of emptiness take form as the vacant body and the framework for a theological vision of heaven, hell, reunion or ultimate separation. Moving from the cognitive to the corporeal, Amy DeRogatis, Professor of Religion and American Culture at Michigan State University, takes up Corrigan's treatment of the body as the site of individual and collective performances of emptiness. DeRogatis, whose own deep analysis of evangelical sex manuals addresses these questions of prescriptive theological and biological acts with wider corporate significance, centers on the question: whose bodies? Desiring bodies, hungry bodies, bleeding bodies engender different social definitions when those bodies are male or female, old or young, rich or poor, white or black or brown. Corrigan's analysis of emptiness as a devotional act through tears, fasting, bloodletting, heavenly tongues and earthly hungers makes for a rich conversation about the differences, among other things, between Catholic and protestant bodies, antebellum and postbellum bodies, working and stilled bodies, and healed and unhealed bodies in a changing America.

Chapter 3's account of space makes for perfect fodder for John Seitz, Professor of American Religion at Fordham University. Seitz explores one of Corrigan's primary arguments about the social function of the interplay of empty and full. Though emptiness can embody a theological good as an invitation to be filled by God, it can also symbolize the weaknesses of our enemies, the foils against which we decide they are deficient. A historian of American Catholicism, Seitz sees this exemplified in the life of Dorothy Day, whose intense desire to be emptied of self led her extreme self-sacrifice and self-mortification, which, in turn, separated her from the middle-to-upper class identities of many followers of the Catholic Worker movement. In this way, her emptiness both invited and repulsed people, drawing ideological boundaries between followers.

Finally, Matthew Sutton, Professor of History at Washington State University, ruminates on the broader questions that the category of emptiness offers American religious historians. He argues that Corrigan has gathered an impressive amount of data into a compelling account of, among other things, sexual bodies waiting to be filled, material desires yearning to be met, and imagined deserts in the heart of America. Further, as an expert in American views of the end of the world, Sutton naturally draws us into questions about time and context. Do sweeping thematic categories like emptiness divorce readers from the rich worldview of particular eras or has the book already won the day for now we can see it everywhere?

This panel, like the book itself, raises more questions than answers, but it is always so with satisfying conversations. Corrigan's deft history works like a Guy Maddin movie, whose silent-movie style of modern film making leaves readers with an unsettled sense that all has been revealed though not everything has been said. He has painted an illuminating portrait of American religion through the feeling of emptiness, and its suggestive art of too-much, not-enough. Emptiness can define individual devotion, but also collective meaning making. It can expose as much as it conceals. In his provocative way, Corrigan has successfully written the history of a void that demands to be filled.