Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America

by John Corrigan

For many Christians in America, becoming filled with Christ first requires being empty of themselves―a quality often overlooked in religious histories. In Emptiness , John Corrigan highlights for the first time the various ways that American Christianity has systematically promoted the cultivation of this feeling.  

Corrigan examines different kinds of emptiness essential to American Christianity, such as the emptiness of deep longing, the emptying of the body through fasting or weeping, the emptiness of the wilderness, and the emptiness of historical time itself. He argues, furthermore, that emptiness is closely connected to the ways Christian groups differentiate many groups foster a sense of belonging not through affirmation, but rather avowal of what they and their doctrines are not. Through emptiness, American Christians are able to assert their identities as members of a religious community.

Drawing much-needed attention to a crucial aspect of American Christianity, Emptiness expands our understanding of historical and contemporary Christian practices. 

232 pages, Hardcover

First published April 29, 2015

About the author

John Corrigan is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of History at Florida State University. He is author or editor of several books, including The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

innovative in that we haven't looked at emptiness as a paradigmatic emotion for the history of American Christianity. This study surely reveals that emptiness is a useful paradigm for understanding American Christianity, but it also decidedly interprets as much as possible under the rubric of emptiness. I.e., Corrigan really stretches what emptiness means, and almost always enters dialectics of empty/full via the former, rather than the latter. His conclusions are a product of his sources as well; I would recommend James Ault's Spirit and Flesh as a counterpoint to Corrigan's pessimism about the possibilities of in-group ID formation among Christians in the modern world. If fundamentalists can develop a strong sense of coherence, then so can less rascally groups. Corrigan only looks for cohesion in capital D Discourse: doctrine, belief, collaborative and ecumenical organization, etc. Doesn't see how on-the-ground religious communities form coherent group IDs through everyday life, as much as he likes citing de Certeau.

[Adam Sweatman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever in its approach, Emptiness surveys a broad swath of American history to highlight an important - and historiographically neglected - aspect of religious experience.