John Williamson Nevin's life has never been given the full attention that it deserves. That may be due in part to the controversial nature of his thinking. Yet in many respects, his enormous contribution to American religious history is acknowledged by those who have read him. He stood out as the great advocate of evangelical catholicism, and his call for a thorough examination of the place of the church in nineteenth-century theology was revolutionary. It was Nevin who first saw the threat to the church in the erosion of faith in the church as a divine institution sacramentally entrusted by God with the reclamation of the whole world--an erosion that occurred well before the Civil War in the hypersubjectivity of Protestant America.

Linden J. DeBie received his PhD from McGill University. His books include Speculative Philosophy and Common-Sense Religion (Pickwick, 2008), The Mystical Presence, by John W. Nevin (coedited; Wipf & Stock, 2012), and Coena Mystica (coedited; Wipf & Stock, 2013). He has taught at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and Seton Hall University and is currently pastor of the Colonial Church of Bayside, New York.