Delight Makers

Across three centuries, this study follows the place of desire in Anglo-American religious life. Catherine L. Albanese traces a line of thought that runs from Jonathan Edwards through Ralph Waldo Emerson to the beliefs of today's religiously unaffiliated, and she reconstructs the shared logic that links these figures.

Where many religious traditions center suffering as the route to salvation, the thinkers examined here locate a metaphysical bond between the beauty of the natural world and spiritual wholeness. For them, the earth's abundance reveals an expansive God who wants to satisfy human longing through material prosperity, physical well-being, and sexual freedom.

Albanese builds her account through close readings of figures including Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, and Esther Hicks. She shows how this theology of delight developed alongside American political arguments about natural law and individual liberty.