Exploring the relationship between theology and urbanity in the Old South, E. Brooks Holifield examines the patterns of religious thought that pervaded the churches and seminaries of antebellum America. And he suggests that in the South, as elsewhere, the "rational orthodoxy" of Protestant and Catholic theologians reflected both intellectual commitments and social compulsions. Unlike the prevailing depictions of nineteenth-century Southern religion as a perpetual display of evangelical enthusiasm, Holifield's study maintains that the era of revivalism was also an age of reason and that the rationalism often proved as durable as the fervor. In contrast to historians preoccupied with the frontier and rural South, the author argues that the study of towns and cities can produce a new understanding of Southern intellectual history. --