In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans encountered an unexpected group of people who, at first sight, seemed unreal: Hasidic hippies. Conceiving of Hasidic Judaism as being incompatible with the spirit of the era and of hippie culture as being far removed from the Jewish tradition, most Jews could not comprehend how anyone could try to amalgamate two such opposing cultures.

Many of the young Hasidic hippies were affiliated with or influenced by the House of Love and Prayer (HLP), a Jewish outreach center that operated in San Francisco between 1967 and 1977 and promoted the mixture of traditional Hasidic Judaism with the counter-culture. It represented a new generation in American religious life: the baby boomers, with their spiritual journeys and cultural preferences, which included attempts to unite religious traditions and cultural trends that just a few years earlier had seemed too different to bridge. The HLP promoted the return to tradition and the embracing of the mystical and supernatural elements of Judaism. Together with other groups that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, the HLP helped bring about a revolution in the practicing of the Jewish tradition, one that gave expression to the style and values of the Jewish members of the counterculture.

Sunday, March 21, 1993, was a memorable day for the more than two thousand members of Highland Park Baptist Church (HPBC) in Southfield, Michigan, for it marked the end of the church's fiftieth annual missions conference. The event had gathered people from HPBC and other churches to discuss the many social, economic, and moral issues threatening the vitality of community life in metro-politan Detroit. Following several rousing hymns, including “Raise Up an Army, O God” and “The City Is Alive, O God,” HPBC senior pastor Leonard Crowley ended the historic proceedings by offering an impassioned sermon on the Judaic institution of “Jubilee,” an Old Testament mandate that called for restoration of land and property to original ownership. Crowley had much to say about this antiquated ideal and its personal application to HPBC members, but the most pointed and intriguing elements of his jeremiad concerned the con-gregational body as a whole.

In August 1742, a little-known scene of the Great Awakening was unfolding in the Mahican villages that dotted the Housatonic Valley region of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. On August 10, the colorful Moravian leader, Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, arrived in the village of Shekomeko to check on the progress of the newly founded mission. Six months earlier, he had overseen the baptism of the first three villagers. Their baptized names—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—expressed the Moravians’ grand hopes that the men would be patriarchs to a new nation of believers. Zinzendorf was now in Shekomeko to witness as these three men assumed the Christian offices of elder, teacher, and exhorter. Twenty miles away and two days later, melancholic missionary David Brainerd preached the Presbyterian gospel of salvation in hopes of saving the residents of Pachgatgoch from Moravian heresy.

In the winter of 1905, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (L.D.S. or the “Mormons”) departed Utah on two, seemingly disparate, missions to the east coast. One contingent went to defend their church at Senate hearings in Washington, D.C.; the other, to Vermont to dedicate a monument to church founder Joseph Smith. These forays into national politics and religious memory re-fashioned Latter-day Saint identity, as well as public perception of Mormonism, for the remainder of the twentieth Century They also illuminate one of the quotidian mysteries of religion: how it adapts to the demands of time yet maintains its sense of mediating the eternal. It is axiomatic that religious communities are not exempt from the human condition; they must adapt to their temporal circumstances or die. What is not as often recognized is that churches bring a particular burden to this task because they offer their believers the hope of transcending time.

In 1938, Jerome Folkman, a Reform rabbi from Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended a dinner party hosted by one of his congregants. The guests had finished eating and were settling into typical after-dinner chatter, when the audacious “Mr. R.” broke the rhythm and declared, “We should send missionaries to the gentiles and try to win converts to Judaism.” Side conversations halted and the guests, all Jewish, curiously peered at Mr. R. as he continued: “Why aren't we more aggressive? Why don't we ask others to join our ranks?” The guests tittered. Some giggled nervously, others muttered that Jews just don't do that. A pragmatist interrupted—the suggestion, in his mind, was only as good as its actual consequences. “Do you think we would get any converts?” he asked. Rabbi Folkman, who later divulged he, too, had toyed with the idea of Jews becoming missionaries in America, tried to clarify the kernel of wisdom behind Mr. R.'s shocking statement.

The impact of Horace Bushnell on American religion has been well documented, but the cultural significance of his life and thought has not been fully appreciated. A Congregationalist and pioneering ecumenist, Bushnell has been cast as the father of evangelical liberalism by theologians and religious historians. His numerous published sermons and treatises on child nurture, religious language, and the atonement were widely read during the nineteenth century and made him a celebrated and often controversial figure. Though vehemently opposed to Darwinian naturalism later in life, he nevertheless oversaw the collapse of Calvinist transcendence into the confines of historical and cultural development—which has been the definitive characteristic of liberal Protestant spirituality since the 1870s. Yet, during an age of social transformation, is Bushnell better understood as a laissez-faire liberal or an organicist social conservative? Better still, how might we characterize the relationship between his mediating theology and ambiguous social thought?