History of Christianity.

Christian Century, Oct 17, 2006 by Mark A. Noll

Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. By Harry S. Stout. (Viking, 400 pp., $29.95.) This study of cultural conflict, American civil religion and religious justification for war is as timely for its implicit commentary on current affairs as for its explicit engagement with the determinative historical event of the U.S. Stout uses classical just war theory to weigh the Civil War in the balance and finds it wanting on both sides. In his view, propagandistic mythmaking and romantic ideology masked both the human cost of this terrible war and its failure to resolve the nation's enduring crisis over race.

The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970. By Michael Gauvreau. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 512 pp., $85.00.) Gauvreau's thorough volume represents the best attempt yet to explain the rapid secularization of what was once the most thoroughly Christianized region of North America. His compelling argument shows clearly that efforts within the Catholic Church were responsible for promoting a new understanding of Christianity that displayed new social and intellectual sophistication but offered almost nothing with which to withstand the economic, cultural and political whirlwind that swept Quebec beginning in the 1950s. Ironically, liberalizing changes in Canada were often associated with Catholic Action, which, under Pope John Paul II, became a forceful tool for conservative resurgence in the church worldwide.

Selected by Mark A. Noll, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.