| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata. By Jeff Bach. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. xx, 282 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-271-02250-7.)
The long-lived community that was housed at the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, embodied a significant chapter in the extensive American history of religious experimentation. Although dozens, if not hundreds, of books and articles have previously told Ephrata's story and attempted to plumb its mystical theology, Jeff Bach's is the first book to do the job comprehensively, empathetically, and accurately.	1
Ephrata was grounded in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century radical Pietism of Germany, the wing of the larger Pietist movement that found the existing Protestant establishment hopeless and abandoned it, often amid strong millennial hopes. Ephrata's founder, Conrad Beissel, and others were grounded in that outlook but went beyond it to create a distinctive mystical experience that stood at the spiritual core of a residential community. That monastic community, which emerged in the 1720s and 1730s and had several hundred members at its peak, endured for nearly a century, and the group's church survived noncommunally for more than a century longer.	. . .

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