Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College. His previous books include The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, and The Promise of Hermeneutics.

Roger Lundin traces how pragmatism and its reliance on experience eclipsed nature and religion as the ultimate moral authority. He explores why Americans prize experience as highly as they do, what they build out of it in works of culture and their daily lives, how they manage to make sense of it, and where people might turn when they reach the limits of experience.

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Preferences of Eden
Chapter 2: Delivered to the Dream: Emerson and the Pathways of Pragmatism
Chapter 3: Reading the Blooming Confusion: William James and the Theology of Experience
Chapter 4: Diminished Things: Literature and the Disenchantment of the World
Chapter 5: Divining Lives
Chapter 6: Intentional Ironies
Chapter 7: The Truth Beyond Method: Fiction at the Limits of Experience
Conclusion