In 1858, a baker's son from New York City stood before a small congregation and made an argument that scandalized almost everyone who heard it: that to be a person of deep faith and a citizen of a free republic were not competing ambitions but expressions of the same underlying reality. Isaac Hecker spent his life insisting that a civilization cannot sustain its civic ideals without a living spiritual foundation beneath them --- and was condemned for it. Harmonia traces the thread from a modest church on 59th Street through the great ideological failures of the twentieth century to the global question that Hecker's refusal planted in the world: can the human family build a common future without finally understanding what it actually is?

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