This volume brings together fourteen of Paul Giles' essays in the fields of American studies, literature and religion written between 1994 and 2009, including the classic "Reconstructing American Studies" (1994). They range from the culture of colonial America to the writing of Henry James, Robert Coover and Kathy Acker, and from the presidency of George W. Bush to the criticism of F. O. Matthiessen. Giles's studies of religion in American society follow the development of secularized Catholicism from nineteenth-century slave narratives to the musical performances of Bruce Springsteen.