In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century "religious marketplace" in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been...

Profiles the nineteenth-century orator known as "the Great Agnostic," who spoke out on reason, secularism, and separation of church and state, and explores his place in the American intellectual tradition.