The eighteen essays collected in this book had their origin in a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come.

J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937), writes D. G. Hart, was "the scion of a prominent and genteel Baltimore family, who studied at the finest American and European universities and, while teaching at Princeton Seminary, went on to become one of the United States's leading authorities in New Testament studies." Defending the Faith explains "how a privileged and learned Protestant became embroiled in the religious disputes of the 1920s, " writes Hart. This study, he continues, "has much to tell us not just about the issues that unsettled--some would say unseated--mainstream Protestantism's hold on American intellectual and cultural life. But it also offers a distinctive and revealing perspective on the way we have come to assess and locate religion, science, and modernity in the early twentieth century." This biography, the first of Machen since 1955, originally appeared in 1994.