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Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries. By Stephen C. Taysom. Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. xiv + 259 pp. $34.95 cloth.

as a talisman of current philosophical and anthropological debates, he sometimes seems to float away from the historical worlds he otherwise studies with such relish. Once in that rarefied air it is of little importance that “evangelical secularism,” as Modern admits, “did not even exist at the level of empirical reality” in the antebellum period—only that the academic seer can discern it hovering ghost-like in the atmosphere (55). Such intellectual feats can be clever and evocative; they can also be pompous and opaque. To wit: “Yet in framing secularism in terms of recursivity, of structures looping back upon themselves and the individuals who precipitated them, I also frame practices as recursive sites in which the accelerating convolution of a self-environment complex is ordered and given momentary pause. This is a process whereby each day seems like a natural fact” (288). How one views such acts of scholarly divining will determine whether one wants to take up Modern’s book or keep it at arm’s length.