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My first debt of thanks goes to the many homesteaders who opened up their homes and gardens to me from 1994, when I began an early version of this study, to the present. Many who hosted me are not profiled closely in this book, and still fewer are mentioned with their real names (see the Appendix), yet the role they have played remains vital. There are others whose printed words gave me sufficient insight into their doings that I chose not to pester them in person and still others whom I met informally through letters, at lectures and workshops , and in wider homesteading circles. There is not room in this book to tell everyone’s story, and much more could be written about these many remarkable lives. Their stories and insights, whether shared in the course of pages, mentioned in a single footnote, or hinted at in a broader comment, have made the texture of this book what it is. While the analysis is my own, the lives I have written about are ones that were graciously shared with me. The homesteaders who are the subjects of this book have my deepest gratitude and my enduring respect. To the “A.W.K.W.B.’s” who were my neighbors in 1996, and to those mentioned throughout this text, you know who you are, and you have my special thanks and affection. A wider circle of individuals who knew the Nearings well as friends, family members, or students of their lives have helped illuminate this study beyond measure. In addition to many of the anonymous homesteaders mentioned above, I have been touched by both the intellectual generosity and the friendship of Nancy and Warren Berkowitz, Ellen LaConte and Dolly Hatfield, John xxiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Saltmarsh and Gisele Grenon, Greg Joly and Mary Diaz, Robert Nearing, and Elka Schumann. Hendrik Gideonse and the Gideonse family provided me a place to hang my hat at various stages of research and are part of this story. Laura Waterman offered reflections on her life, which reverberate through this study and reconnected me to an earlier time when I encountered both her and Guy Waterman through shared work for the Appalachian Mountain Club. My extended stay at the Nearing’s Forest Farm was made possible by the Trust for Public Land and the Good Life Center. A long list of TPL staff and Good Life Center staff, volunteers, and subsequent stewards have added much to this project . Generous support from the Lilly Endowment and the Mellon Foundation on this and related projects throughout my graduate school years have given me the gift of time and have enriched my thinking about religion and American culture . A Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Grant made it possible to write one version of this study and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for the Study of American Religion (now the Center for the Study of Religion) at Princeton University gave me the opportunity to envision the project anew as a quite different book. While at Princeton, I received encouragement and advice from Robert Wuthnow and Ann Taves, whose insights have continued to shape my thinking on this project as well as on American religion more broadly. Diane Winston, Susan Myers-Shirk, and Cynthia Eller also generously gave feedback on portions of the text during that year. The deeper roots of this book go back a very long way. I would not have become a scholar of religion, beginning in my undergraduate years, had it not been for my brilliant introduction to the field by Diana L. Eck, who so wonderfully demonstrates a blend of intellectual rigor and personal compassion. Other model teachers and scholars who influenced my intellectual growth at important junctures include: Dorothy A. Austin, the late William Alfred, John Cort, Jim Engell, Alan Hodder, Missy Holland, Will Marquess, Richard Niebuhr, Bud Ruf, Sharon Welch, and Carol Zaleski. In the still more distant past, Janet Brecher, Dorothy DiDomenico, and Richard Gauthier taught me the arts of infusing work with love. In terms of this particular project, the intellectual encouragement has been longstanding and exceedingly generous. Nancy Tatom Ammerman first introduced me to the joys of fieldwork and so permanently changed me into a historian with a love of ethnography. Members of the American Religious History Colloquium at the Harvard Divinity School helped to create a rare model of intellectual community. William Hutchison ably co-led the colloquium, opened my eyes to many facets of nineteenth- and twentieth...

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