Strange gods: a secular history of conversion

Part I: Young Christendom and the fading pagan gods. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) ; The way, the truth, the life, the Empire ; Coercion, conversion, and heresy

Part II: From Convivencia to the stake. Bishop Paul of Burgos (c. 1352-1435) ; Impureza de sangre : the crumbling of the Convivencia ; The Inquisition and the end

Part III: Reformations. John Donne (1572-1631) ; "Not with sword ... but with printing" ; Persecution in an age of religious conversion

Part IV: Conversions in the dawn of the Enlightenment. Margaret Fell (1614-1702) : woman's mind, woman's voice ; Religious choice and early Enlightenment thought ; Miracles versus evidence : conversion and science ; Prelude: O my America!

Part V: The Jewish conversion question : where Christianity stumped its toe. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) : convictionless conversion ; The varieties of coercive experience ; Edith Stein (1891-1942) : the sainthood of a converted Jew

Part VI: American exceptionalism : toward religious choice as a natural right. Peter Cartwright (1785-1872) : anti-intellectualism and the battle for reason ; Remaking the Protestant American compact

Interregnum: Absolutism and its discontents. True believers

Part VII: The way we live now. "The greatest" : Muhammad Ali and the demythologizing decade ; American dreaming

Conclusion: Darkness visible.