tales, and each one finds a unique way to move beyond. This moving beyond can be difficult, disorienting, and may make some readers (their contemporaries or now) suspicious. But it is this moving beyond that allows them to come to know God and know themselves and their fel- low humans. Farley’s short chapters and explication help to draw even the uninitiated reader along. And just as the women draw their readers along to a final goal of contemplation, Farley hopes to allow her readers to see how the overall projects of these women can help the modern practitioner, requiring them to understand the overall picture in order to be interested in learn- ing the praxis. Reclaiming the tradition of contemplation, especially as these women practiced it in lives that did not remove them from the world, allows the reader to begin to seek out new ways to nourish souls. Farley notes that familiar practice and belief also are comforting. Farley is aware that leading people to new practice can breed anxiety. And in showing there are prece- dents, she is trying to help calm people as they find new freedom in a connection between con- templation and love. The book aims to find ways to encounter scripture so as to awaken and enliven experience, rather than to restrict. It sees contemplation as opening the heart, and allow- ing joy. By the end of this book, we have a strong set of examples of how love has been the foundation for theologies based on experience of God and on expression of human relations with God. Andrea Janelle Dickens Arizona State University Department of English 851 S. Cady Mall Tempe, AZ 85287-0302 USA Email: andrea.dickens@asu.edu The Political Dialogue of Nature and Grace: Toward a Phenomenology of Chaste Anarchism by Caitlin Smith Gilson (New York, NY: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), xvii 1 286 pp. In the early nineteenth century, French philosopher Auguste Comte recognized that something had been lost in his homeland with the rise of modernity and the collapse of the once holistic philosophy of life that undergirded the ancien r  egime for many centuries. Of course, Comte was an atheist and believed the theological wisdom of his ancestors was child’s play which must necessarily give way to a more mature and scientific philosophy. He was no secularist for whom the state should serve as a neutral arbiter of competing reli- gious and ideological interests. For Comte, it was all or nothing. One holistic philosophy must give way to another, so he proposed an atheistic “religion of humanity” that could fill the intel- lectual void left from Christianity’s demise while simultaneously shaping the affections of a more enlightened citizenship. In Comte’s wild vision, France would be governed by enlightened scientist-priests and would need two hundred regional parishes with one priest for every 6,000 citizens, a multitude of athe- istic churches and cemeteries, a detailed liturgical calendar, and an established hierarchy. He envisioned a growing religion that would spread beyond Europe and would be maintained by national and regional councils under the guidance of seven metropolitans led by a primate in Paris. The main purpose of Comte’s religion of humanity would be to direct citizens towards consistent works of charity in order to improve the condition of society as a whole. Although his positivist program was clearly anti-theistic, he used the word “religion” intentionally in order to emphasize the fact that he was offering an alternative to Christianity. Comte believed that the Church’s time had come and gone and that it must be replaced by some- thing better. Although Comte’s “religion of humanity” seems ludicrous on the surface, it was prophetic in many ways. He was among the first in a long line of so-called “social scientists” to recommend that humanity would be better off if directed by an atheistic humanism unencumbered by super- stitious notions of a beneficent God governing all things and requiring human allegiance and affection. Comte believed the world of nature, including human nature and society, must be 688 Reviews V C 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd