This text explains what religious terrorists and religious peacemakers share in common and what causes them to take different paths in fighting injustice.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Catholics, who make up a quarter of the population of the United States, made significant contributions to American culture, politics, and society. They built powerful political machines in Chicago, Boston, and New York; led influential labor unions; created the largest private school system in the nation; and established a vast network of hospitals, orphanages, and charitable organizations. Yet in both scholarly and popular works of history, the distinctive presence and agency of Catholics as Catholics is almost entirely absent. In this book, R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings bring together American historians of race, politics, social theory, labor, and gender to address this lacuna, detailing in cogent and wide-ranging essays how Catholics negotiated gender relations, raised children, thought about war and peace, navigated the workplace and the marketplace, and imagined their place in the national myth of origins and ends. A long overdue corrective, Catholics in the American Century restores Catholicism to its rightful place in the American story.

Publisher Description

Traditional, secular, and fundamentalist—all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. This interplay brings to the foreground more than ever the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern Tradition as living discernment from fundamentalism? What does it mean to live in Tradition when surrounded by something like the “secular”? These essays interrogate these mutual implications, beginning from the understanding that whatever secular or fundamentalist may mean, they are not Tradition, which is historical, particularistic, in motion, ambiguous and pluralistic, but simultaneously not relativistic. Contributors: R. Scott Appleby, Nikolaos Asproulis, Brandon Gallaher, Paul J. Griffiths, Vigen Guroian, Dellas Oliver Herbel, Edith M. Humphrey, Slavica Jakelić, Nadieszda Kizenko, Wendy Mayer, Brenna Moore, Graham Ward, Darlene Fozard Weaver

Sullivan published his Letters to His Holiness Pope Pius X, repudiating Roman authority.

The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern WorldPhotographs by Micah Marty "Something rare: a fair-minded assessment of religious fundamentalism. In this companion volume to a three-part PBS series, Marty and Appleby aim to dissipate the fog of ignorance that surrounds the average understanding of fundamentalism.. . . A useful guide to what is proving to be . . . a historical movement at least as important as Marxist-Leninism."-Kirkus Reviews

The role of religious and ethnic identity in individual behavior and international conflict.

Finding themselves in a Protestant nation with little interest and less respect for Catholic habits of mind, often the sons and daughters of immigrants who had no training in the intellectual life of their native cultures, Catholics found themselves challenged to show one could be both Catholic and American. The result was one that Appleby, Byrne, and Portier see as a work of creative fidelity. In this book, the editors offer the reader a chance to see what Catholics from the earliest days to the present grappled with that task. In the process, we gain insight into such questions as, Is there or even ought there be a distinctively Catholic intellectual style? How can Catholics best bring their insights into the nature and shape of the common weal into the public forum to influence debates? Some texts will seem quaint. Others, though, take on immense relevance as one comes to understand the relative poverty of secular ethics in coming to grips with many of the truly great issues that matter most to how a nation ought to live its life. Texts from figures as different as Thomas Merton and John Carroll, Orestes Brownson and John Courtney Murray illuminate the landscape of American Catholic intellectual life. This book is absolutely important for college courses on Catholic life and history, but it will also be fascinating reading for the general reader who wants to understand how the Catholic people made themselves a richly furnished intellectual home in an often hostile land.

This booklet examines the irreducible role of religion and authentic religious belief in several regional and international conflicts. Major manifestations of a global religious resurgence are the fundamentalist and fundamentalist like movements, which seek political power to complement and enforce their religious and cultural programs. Chapters include: (1) "The Surprising Resurgence of Religion"; (2) "The Rise and Social Dynamics of Fundamentalism"; (3) "The Impact of Fundamentalism"; and (4) "Interpretations of Fundamentalism." Monographs in FPA's Headline Series are published approximately four times a year and are intended as a resource for teachers and students in the foreign policy area. Each monograph: is about a world area or topic; is written by a noted scholar; is brief (usually 64 pages); is written to be highly readable; and includes basic background, maps, charts, discussion guides, and suggested reading. (EH)