Andrea Knutson has written a concise yet copious volume tracing the intellectual history of the concept of conversion from Thomas Shepard to Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. The book is broken up into four chapters, one for each of the authors reviewed. The chapter on Shepard develops a line of Puritan scholarship “seeking to challenge Miller's notion that the Puritans who emigrated to New England were a zealous group embarking on a grand mission to found an exemplary society” (17). Knutson draws primarily from Andrew Delbanco in this reaction as she examines the narratives of confession collected as tests for church membership. The migration to New England is shown to be more than simply geographical: “it brings them to the horizons of their spiritual and discursive lives, requiring a new theological conception of America to accommodate the expanse of feeling that needed space to evolve” (52). Knutson then explores the ways that Edwards theorized conversion as a new “Logick” (a new method of perception) by adopting the idea of consciousness as an active, creative force bringing God's world into being.

Edwards theorized a “different kind of mental habit” (56) rendering the conversion experience in the context of affections rooted in “inclination, which brings together two of the mind's faculties, the understanding and the will, into a motive for action” (58). Hence, the moment of conversion, broken up into observable units by Shepard, “is recast by Edwards as so fluid that all a saint can do is watch it happen in the ‘room of an idea’” (76). In Emerson the idea of conversion in its theological sense is almost nonexistent, yet Knutson reveals how in his writing “one has access to the regime of the spirit, but that access requires an axis of perception that can only be achieved through a practice of piety or method that creates a saving reception” (105). Here the “conversions we experience … are a consequence of searching for meaning within or between the words, sentences and paragraphs of his essays” (94).

Knutson focuses especially on Nature to elucidate what Emerson calls the “universal impulse to believe, a term that manages to contain the physiological potential because ‘man is a method’ to body forth ecstatic knowledge” (115). In Emerson, conversion is reborn “as a process of knowing rather than resting in the known” (133). Subsequently James, impacted by the “massive ideological upset” (136) brought about by Darwin, found pragmatism to “offer the most sustained rendering of the cultural and individual process through which bodies of truth evolve” (136). Arguing that all facts are mediated by perception, James developed a psychology of religious experience affirming the process of belief as conversional. His pragmatic hermeneutic cycle captured the concept that “truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truths” (144). For James, conversion involved “recrystallization” (147) whereby “we touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest centre of energy . . . in these moments we may call ourselves saved” (155).

The book is interdisciplinary as it bridges Shepard's theological dependence on the ordo solutis (the “order of salvation” moving from foreknowledge to glorification) with Edward's Calvinistically orthodox idealism as well as Emerson's literary transcendentalism and James's psychological pragmatism. Knutson effectively demonstrates how each of these authors held the morphology of conversion in high esteem. “The subjects of this study present conversion as a driving force in individual and cultural identity, guiding constantly renewed definitions of the world” (5). The book reveals how each thinker was “committed to creating specific habits in his audiences for the purposes of helping them become more pious or acute interpreters of their experience” (156), and how they each “undertook not only to theorize a method, but the guide for habituating their audiences to that method as well” (159).

Despite a thorough literature review and solid argumentation, the book is somewhat parochial and targeted to an audience interested in and very familiar with these particular authors and eras. Knutson could have included some helpful diagrams, charts or even a few pictures for the rest of us (I am writing this from the perspective of a generalist as a Geographer of Religion). For instance, she discussed the “spatial arrangement of the Ramist diagram” (22) and used it to make some important premises, yet there is no such diagram in the volume. The book can also be repetitive with consistent uses of phrases such as, “as I demonstrated in the last chapter” (57) and “as I have discussed” (102) followed by a substantial re-hashings of arguments already made. It could also use a conclusive chapter to tie together the arguments of the volume as a whole, point to new areas of research and perhaps consider the four subjects in light of current spiritual and socio-ecological challenges. Yet, there is enough here for readers to make their own applications. The book provides a very helpful, well-researched historical treatise offering important points of insight and revelation in the fields of theology, philosophy, literature, psychology, and history.