Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted

Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord, Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. This mandate coming down from American Puritan times to New Age seekers, to be always converting, and always converted, places a radical burden on the self as site of renewal and world-change, even as conversion becomes surrounded by deconversion (rejection of prior beliefs) and counterconversion (turns to alternative beliefs) across global modernity. Rob Wilsons reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry pkahaia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, torn from the stomach of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that pkahaias conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth. By mapping the poetics and politics of conversion and counterconversion, Wilson returns conversion to its central place in the American literature, history, and psyche. Through pkahaias story, and through the works of the Tongan social scientist and fiction writer Epeli Hauofa, Wild West poet Ai, and the mercurial Bob Dylan, Wilson demonstrates that conversionseemingly an anachronistic concern in this secular ageis instead a global, yet deeply American subject, less about salvation or finality than about experimentation and the quest for modern beatitude.