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 themselves: 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. 

John Corrigan is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and professor of history at Florida State University. He is the editor of the Chicago History of American Religion series, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor, most recently, of Religion in American History.

— Peter J. Thuesen, author of Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine

— Matthew Avery Sutton, author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism

— Peter N. Stearns, founder and editor of the Journal of Social History

— John Lardas Modern, author of Secularism in Antebellum America

— Catholic Library World

— Review and Expositor

— Christian Century

— Journal of Social History

— Religion

— Church History