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Gregory are the only two contributors who display awareness of the multidisciplinary conversations found in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Modern Intellectual History, and elsewhere. Formations of Belief contains no reference to Callum G. Brown, Mark Chaves, Philip Kitcher, or David Voas. No less surprising is the lack of any discussion of the United States. The first nation in the North Atlantic West to operate under a fully secular constitution has also been, by standard indicators, much more religious than other industrialized nations, including those where religion is supported by state power. Recently the scene of rapid and accelerating religious decline, the United States is now more central than ever to scholarly discussions of “religion and the secular.” Gregory alludes to the distinctive American case in occasional footnotes, but one cannot expect a specialist in Reformation Europe to carry this volume’s engagement with one of the modern world’s most conspicuous sites for the religion-secular dynamic. Nord alludes to the United States in a single footnote but says nothing about the highly salient contemporary work of K. Healan Gaston, Andrew Jewett, and David Sehat, or about the classic contributions of Thomas Luckmann, Martin Marty, and George Marsden. Guenther’s afterword exemplifies the odd choices that inform this collection. Apparently designed as a pulling-together of the volume’s contributions, the afterword mentions only half of the essays! Guenther spends most of her time in a dubiously relevant excursus on neurotheology. This laboratory intensive effort to evaluate mystical experiences scientifically—scans searching for a “god spot” on the brain—has proved of limited value, Guenther concludes, since it merely reproduces the same theological divisions neurological research was designed to transcend. The volume’s most trenchant lines are found in Gordon’s concluding reflections on the blind spots that “skepticism about secularism” has rendered widespread. “Critics of secularism do not often trouble themselves with the self-reflexive question as to whether their own critical practices are not conditioned by or even dependent upon the historical emergence of secularized forms of consciousness that only now have the epistemic privilege of turning back in skepticism upon their own pre-history.” These critics tend to forget that they are “children of the Enlightenment.” Today’s pushback against secularism has produced an ostensibly wise “melancholy,” Gordon warns, “that forbids us from thinking through religion as a historical form with its own distinctive patterns of domination and occlusion” (201).