Readers of the New Testament could be excused for thinking that there is little consistency in the manner in which miracles are represented in the Gospels. Those events typically identified as miracles are variously described as “signs” (semeia), “wonders” (terata), “mighty works” (dunameis), and, on occasion, simply “works” (erga). The absence of a distinct terminology for the miraculous suggests that the authors of the Gospels were not working with a formal conception of “miracle”—at least not in that Humean sense of a “contravention of the laws of nature,” familiar to modern readers. Neither is there a consistent position on the evidentiary role of these events. In the synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—Jesus performs miracles on account of the faith of his audience. In John's Gospel, however, it is the performance of miracles that elicits faith. Even in the fourth Gospel, moreover, the role of miracles as signs of Christ's divinity is not straightforward. Thus those who demand a miracle are castigated: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” Finally, signs and wonders do not provide unambiguous evidence of the sanctity of the miracle worker or of the truth of their teachings. Accordingly, the faithful were warned (in the synoptic Gospels at least) that “false Christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders [in order] to deceive.”

As England's public upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century were turning ominous, the antinomian preacher Tobias Crisp set his own stamp upon tempestuous times. Christ Alone Exalted comprises a series of sermons that Crisp delivered, “in or neare London,” in the early 1640s. The collection oozes discontent. Excrescences theological and devotional, Crisp had decided, needed to be removed, for they were imperiling vulnerable souls. Christian truths were now contending with “brethren” too smitten by the “righteousnesse of the Law” to stand in any but an adversarial relationship with “the free grace of God which is by faith.” Crisp offered a reparative blade. He repaired by cutting and thrusting, and in so doing sought to make amends for a host of puritan horrors. And for all the quietism that informed his alternative covenantal vision, Crisp did not operate softly. He had targets in his sights; he would dislodge from its place of security in the hearts and minds of the brethren a world of religious thought and action. The seethingly indignant responses of his critics testify to the bang with which Crisp had arrived. Crisp delivered a combustible mix of acrid polemic and nonconforming theology. He let it be known that an overly legalized soteriology had precipitated a pandemic of religious troubles; a desiccated, formulaic piety was smothering the spiritual life out of the gospel message. In short, Crisp was issuing a vigorous challenge to the legitimacy of a pietistic tradition that was overly elaborated and destructive of souls.

History demonstrates that the calendar is a tool of far more significance than simply a means to organize units of time. For Roman high priests prior to the reign of Julius Caesar, the calendar was a tool of power, symbolizing political supremacy over society through the manipulation of time at will. Under Pope Gregory XIII, the calendar was a symbol of papal responsibility to ensure the proper worship of the Catholic Church. In the case of European Protestants, the Julian calendar was a symbol of religious identity and protest against Catholic domination. Likewise, within revolutionary France, the Calendrier Républicain symbolized the rejection of the Ancien Régime and Catholicism. These few examples are an indication that throughout history in various times and places calendars have proven to represent more to humanity than mere time reckoning methods. Consequently, one may approach the study of the calendar as a means to grasp cultural and religious identity within specific regional contexts.

In 1921, William Norton of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago pushed, pulled, and dragged his Model T along the back roads of the southern Appalachians. He visited churches, schools, and private homes, talking with anyone and everyone he could find. His question was always the same: “Do you have enough Bibles?” The answers he received shocked him. As far as Norton could tell, many of the “mountaineers” were nominally Christian, but they had often never seen a Bible, much less read one of their own. As the head of the Moody Bible Institute's Bible Institute Colportage Association, he immediately put together a plan. “To reach these people quickly,” he wrote in his report, “I am convinced that it can be done most efficiently … through the public schools.… A great majority of the teachers are ready to cooperate.”

In the autumn of 1876, while attending the nation's Centennial celebration, Miss Harriet M. Barker contracted a case of typhoid fever that left her crippled. While she managed to “get about” on crutches for several years, Barker's health “was gradually failing.” By the spring of 1881, she was “completely prostrated.” For the next four years, Barker remained a “helpless invalid” whose case “seemed to baffle even the best medical skill.” Although she tried various treatments, “all remedies were of but little avail,” and her physicians eventually deemed her incurable, predicting that she had only a few months to live, at most. “During all these years of suffering,” Barker later recounted, “I prayed so earnestly for patience and resignation to God's will, and for the most part rested quietly, and, as I believed, submissively, under what I felt was His needed teaching of me.” But as “the weary years dragged on,” Barker recalled, “I began to think of the subject of Divine Healing.” At first, she reported, the possibility of healing by faith “seemed a great way off—something for only a chosen few.” Although she became “more convinced of the reality of this belief” through discussions with friends who were “deeply interested” in the possibility of faith cure, Barker confessed that she “was still much in the dark about the matter” and could not “see it clearly enough to grasp it for myself.”

On Monday, December 15, 1902, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed the feted arrival of the famed “Mystic Santa Teresa.” The paper regaled its readers with the circus like events that surrounded her arrival to the burgeoning West Coast metropolis: “Santa Teresa, the famous Mexican girl from the land of the Yaqui, in Sonora, who is implicitly believed in by the majority of Mexicans of the Southwest as a healer, who exercises supernatural powers, has settled in Los Angeles permanently, her followers say, and is daily besieged by a pitiful throng of Mexican ‘enfermos.’” According to the Times, wagonloads of hopeful “invalids” made the pilgrimage to Teresa's cottage at the corner of Brooklyn and State in the “Sonoratown” area of East LA. Noting the “Stream of Mexicans Flowing to Her Cottage,” it listed the diverse range of desperate immigrants seeking her healing touch: “The halt, the blind, the inwardly diseased, paralytics, almost helpless and others with bodies ravaged by consumption, are helped to her doors each day by friends and relatives; and none go there without the belief that by the laying on of her magic hands they will be cured.” The reporter attributed all the excitement to the inexorable pull exerted by this “magnetic young woman from the South.” He blithely summarized, “Santa Teresa … has been the subject of many fantastic stories, based more or less on fact. In some ways her influence is really remarkable.”

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.