Anticipating readers, the foreword to this edited collection addresses the title's jarring preposition. Having discarded toward and back to, the editors claim around as their metaphor for the religious turn. The more common alternatives, Nan Goodman explains, dislodge religion from the present time and place, whereas around “provides a panoramic vision” and foregrounds the “give and take between the transcendent and secular realms” (xix). Under this relational rubric, what have been taken to be religious universals and secular particularities are flipped. As one might further expect from the title, the editors' approach pointedly emerges from the work of Sacvan Bercovitch and his well-known analyses of literature and culture. Responding to other turns towards and back to religion, the editors call for a “restag[ing]” of Bercovitch's “interpretive method” (Goodman xxi). Seeking to model a Bercovitchian methodology in its very structure, they even group the essays in two parts, “Universals” and “Particularities.”

The essays in Part I more obviously explicate the reciprocal operations of religion and culture as they explore the “‘specific manifestations’ of larger human problems” (xxi). For example, María DeGuzmán's “Miguel Algarín's ‘Nuyorican Angels’ of Night and the Critique of Enwhitened Idealism” begins by casting Latino/a artists' oft-observed engagement with religious themes as a radical insertion of their perspectives into the fundamental philosophical conversations occurring in the Americas. According to DeGuzmán, Algarín's poetry exemplifies this move and leverages a “prolonged and dark(ness)-hued figuration of angels” to delineate a “conduit passage” between the mundane and the divine and to disrupt distinctions between impurity (associated with the racial and sexual other) and transcendence (50). Laura Wexler's contribution, “The Puritan in the Photograph,” identifies religion as a constitutive component of American photography. Nineteenth-century practitioners appeared to capture ghostly presences not otherwise visible (Wexler offers a picture of Abraham Lincoln's specter embracing his widow), thereby instigating debates about spiritual perception. As a result of these debates, a “Puritan vision of the sanctity of American space and redemptive promise of American time” has long pervaded American photography (156). Drawing upon photography's ability to evoke religious meaning, photographers have an “enviable place to stand” when confronting questions of politics and social injustice (156). Other Part I standouts include the editors' own chapters, “Biblical Typology and the Jewish American Imagination” by Michael P. Kramer and “Robert Keayne's Nails, or a Mercantilist's Version of Christian Charity” by Goodman.

In Part II the volume takes on mythical and narrative particularities, or the ways that literary and cultural productions divulge the contingency of the universal. Lawrence Rosenwald's “Politics, Religion, and Some Poems about Sacco and Vanzetti,” for example, reveals the primacy of style when it comes to seemingly powerful religious symbols. As he shows, the crucifixion metaphor suffusing poems about Nicola Sacco's and Bartolomeo Vanzetti's 1927 trials and executions takes on different valences in different hands. Awkwardly or inopportunely deployed, the metaphor's force dissipates. Wendy Steiner's “Playing God with Beauty: From Hawthorne to Hairspray” juxtaposes an array of subjects to contend that perfection and beauty are at odds, as beauty is interactive, requiring “the addition of a contrastive aspect of human nature, physicality and emotion” (258). Chapters like these insist upon religion's conditionality and indeed suggest that the pull of what have been taken to be universals lies in their particularities.

The volume concludes with two essays on Bercovitch and an afterword by Kramer. Here, the book's structural and philosophical underpinnings crystallize, as the two essays combine to delineate the particularities of Bercovitch's scholarship and Kramer's piece casts Bercovitch as something of a transcendent critic, one who anticipated the religious turnaround and who modeled in the particularities of his scholarship a broadly transformative, perhaps universal, approach. (In “The Ironic Style of Sacvan Bercovitch,” Andrew DuBois seeks to balance this simultaneity when he asserts, “Bercovitch is decidedly not prophetic, or, at any rate, he is idiosyncratically so” (402, original emphasis).) Bercovitch's sway over American literary and cultural scholarship is undeniable, and throughout the volume one sees the malleability of his method. There is a familiarity to these essays, even when at their most provocative or strange, that suggests that the editors' insertion of Bercovitch into the center of the religious turnaround merely makes visible his pervasive influence. Indeed, the collection is like the spirit photograph of the Lincolns reproduced in Wexler's essay. We might have thought we had turned away from Bercovitch or that the present moment calls for a turn back to him, but this volume's contemporary snapshot of American religious studies exposes his lingering phantom.