"In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer examines a hundred years of writing about the frontier experience. Paying particular attention to attitudes about human activity and the transformative power of the American landscape, Joel Daehnke asserts that Manifest Destiny embodied a tense, often contradictory union of Christian and secular views of social progress."

"Enlisting works by Mark Twain and Willa Cather, as well as noncanonical sources, such as private journals, Daehnke examines the manner in which the imagery of the human figure at work and play in the frontier landscape participated in the nationalist, "civilizing" project of westward expansion. While acknowledging the growing secularization of American life, Daehnke surveys the continuing claims of the Christian redemptive scheme as a powerful symbolic domain for these writers' reflections on social progress and the potential for human perfectibility in the landscapes of the West."--Jacket.