In an engaging introduction to her lively yet scholarly book, Catherine L. Albanese announces a multifaceted project. Her ultimate aim, she explains, is to illuminate the agenda of a handful of figures active in the early twenty-first century whose performances, publications, and workshops she showcases in her appreciative final chapters. Yet in pursuit of this seemingly limited aim she proposes to achieve much more, for her strategy is to assign representatives of the movement of interest to her to a distinctive albeit neglected tradition of American spirituality, one that she terms, alternatively, “the theology of desire and delight” or “the theology of abundance.” The major conclusion of her study, she declares at the outset, is that “the theology of desire and delight is American theology” (10).

Albanese’s ambitious project is grounded in a set of deliberately partial readings of the work of a wide range of contributors to American thought,...

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