This volume provides a searching exploration of the aesthetics of immediacy which prodded spiritual transformation for American evangelicals. Transformation here is a layered conceit since Jackson wants to argue, simultaneously, that this aesthetic effected change within individuals; change within a specific religious movement; change within a significant literary form; and, finally, change within society. Within individuals, Jackson focuses on the way certain evocative formats simulated vivid encounters with sin, trial, suffering, and hell. Jackson suggests “homiletic allegories” shifted evangelicals “from a conceptual realism initiated by narrative and sermon heuristics to an external, materially based, simulated reality epitomized by various interactive and performative pedagogies and emerging visual technologies” (4). Within American realist writings, Jackson works to connect its seemingly secular attributes to Christian rhetorical strategies. And by the very exigency of its suggestive extremity, this homiletic form recast “individuals into communities of action,” driven to accomplish immediate social reform (31). Again and again, the mechanism Jackson portrays is a simple one: first, a theatrical but credible example is exposed through literary translation to a Christian public. Second, within that public individual readers encounter that example, and commence a Protestant hermeneutic of self-identification, then, direct application. Audiences thus perceive themselves as in an imminent immanence, where they can see the futures they build through a raw engagement with the present they have been jolted to occupy.

Readers and viewers are, in Jackson's rendering, a general subject to presume from the things they read. The Word and Its Witness is then not a book most historians of American Christianity will find easy to incorporate into their narrative interpretations, as its social specifics are redacted generalities. For such readers, the work of Jason Bivins and Candy Gunther Brown will most likely be more satisfying on the subjects of evangelical horror and print culture, respectively. But Jackson is not a social or cultural historian, so it would be unfortunate if scholars of American religion dismissed his work merely because he does not adequately prove the links he draws between social reform and homiletic literature. Through a concentrated study of parabiblical materials, Jackson supplies an appealing aesthetic criticism, inviting other subsequent researchers to join his investigation into the hermeneutics of evangelicalism. This is a book that does not make itself easy for its readers. But for those readers who persist past its rhetorical indulgences, the rewards are potentially inspiring.

The Word and Its Witness begins with a reading of Jonathan Edwards and the influence of Lockean epistemology on his homiletic theorizations. Eighteenth-century Puritan medievalism produced, Jackson argues, pedagogies of hell for children that grotesquely conveyed a grim landscape for the tormented sinner (for example, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”). The turmoil resulting from such sermonic realism did not dull the listeners into a frightened submission, but instead strengthened the parishioner to stand up in revivalist, reforming combat. This is what Jackson calls “inoculation theology,” referring to the way these homiletic forms infected their listeners with a genuine sense of suffering in order to induce replies of activist immediacy (55). Yet this is not a study of glum and gore. The second chapter, for example, contains a remarkably astute reading of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Tracking how the March family engages The Pilgrim's Progress, Jackson demonstrates the Wesleyan impulses of that fiction, especially as it reminded readers that “an essential element of their individual engagement in the universal struggle is their responsibility to reach out to other pilgrims” (143). Because the March family—like the famed Alcotts—are so complicit in liberal social reforms of the nineteenth century, Little Women is an ideal case for Jackson's illuminating discernment of evangelicalism's local and national consequences. Less convincing is his foray into Social Gospel realism in the third chapter, where he seeks to link novels by Charles Sheldon and Albion Tourgée to a mass movement. He writes that homiletic novels “reenergized Protestantism with a strange mix of practical application, liberalism, and otherwordly spiritualism, sparking a fury of social activism that would become hallmarks of the Progressive era” (214). The failure then of the book is in its claims of historical continuity from Edwards to the Left Behind series, and from the homiletic novel to social reform. Indicative trends are not necessary arguments for causality or genealogical association.

Jackson soars highest when he pursues texts unusual to standard religious history and literary criticism. In that vein, his final chapter on Jacob Riis's virtual tour, How the Other Half Lives, is a genuine triumph, well worth excerpting for class usage in tandem with Riis's book. This is a thorough, well-paced study, attempting few reaches outside the careful documentary limits Riis placed for himself in that collage text. Through analysis of Riis's visual language, allegorical tropes, religious tableaux, and narrative voices, Jackson shows how Riis simulated excursions for his readers into tenement slums. Jackson can therefore argue, that this “virtual tour became muscular Christianity's most technologically advanced reconnaissance into previously frightening corridors, and the analysis embedded in his texts trained Protestant ground troops for what [Riis] proclaimed was a ‘battle with the slums’” (231). Again, some readers may be dissatisfied by the connections between Riis's work and Christianity so construed. Jackson's investment in a linkage between homiletic allegories like Riis's and the evangelical activism which produced (in his account) abolition, temperance, poverty relief, civil rights, suffrage, the Social Gospel, and Progressive era urban reform undercuts his persuasive possibility, not least of which because the varieties of Protestantism which produced these reformers were as varied as the reformers themselves. But as the debates of secularism and its meaning continue under multiple academic auspices, the real work of extracting the discursive forms of religion in modernity may be found in its most sophisticated incarnations within literary study. Jackson's book joins works like Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006) and J. Heath Atchley's Encountering the Secular (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) in their efforts to catalog and, more importantly, intone the valences of post-Reformation religious ideation.