The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformative events, and marginal groups and ethnocultural 'outsiders.' They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in American Protestantism and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture.