Faith in the Fight
Faith in the Fight

Author: Jonathan H. Ebel

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-02-24

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0691162182

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Faith in the Fight tells a story of religion, soldiering, suffering, and death in the Great War. Recovering the thoughts and experiences of American troops, nurses, and aid workers through their letters, diaries, and memoirs, Jonathan Ebel describes how religion--primarily Christianity--encouraged these young men and women to fight and die, sustained them through war's chaos, and shaped their responses to the war's aftermath. The book reveals the surprising frequency with which Americans who fought viewed the war as a religious challenge that could lead to individual and national redemption. Believing in a "Christianity of the sword," these Americans responded to the war by reasserting their religious faith and proclaiming America God-chosen and righteous in its mission. And while the war sometimes challenged these beliefs, it did not fundamentally alter them. Revising the conventional view that the war was universally disillusioning, Faith in the Fight argues that the war in fact strengthened the religious beliefs of the Americans who fought, and that it helped spark a religiously charged revival of many prewar orthodoxies during a postwar period marked by race riots, labor wars, communist witch hunts, and gender struggles. For many Americans, Ebel argues, the postwar period was actually one of "reillusionment." Demonstrating the deep connections between Christianity and Americans' experience of the First World War, Faith in the Fight encourages us to examine the religious dimensions of America's wars, past and present, and to work toward a deeper understanding of religion and violence in American history.

The Great and Holy War
The Great and Holy War

Author: Philip Jenkins

Publisher: Lion Books

Published: 2014-06-20

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0745956742

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The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War, and the lasting impact it had on Christianity and world religions more extensively in the century that followed. The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. A steady stream of patriotic and militaristic rhetoric was served to an unprecedented audience, using language that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon. But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Philip Jenkins reveals how the widespread belief in angels, apparitions, and the supernatural, was a driving force throughout the war and shaped all three of the Abrahamic religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - paving the way for modern views of religion and violence. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism. Connecting remarkable incidents and characters - from Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian Genocide - Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis. We cannot understand our present religious, political, and cultural climate without understanding the dramatic changes initiated by the First World War. The war created the world's religious map as we know it today.

The Spiritual Background to the First World War
The Spiritual Background to the First World War

Author: Rudolf Steiner

Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press

Published: 2024-05-24

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1855846489

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With the unprecedented global conflict of the First World War as an overarching theme, Rudolf Steiner addresses timeless issues such as the search for harmony between peoples and nations, the development of the human capacity for love, the contemporary presence of Christ, and the questions of reincarnation and life after death. Speaking in the German city of Stuttgart during and after the war years, Steiner discusses the perpetual tension between East and West – particularly in relation to Europe. The war, he says, arose principally out of the Anglo-Saxon peoples' determination 'to exercise world-domination'. Knowing that Slavic culture is destined to be the precursor of the sixth cultural epoch, Western national interests resolved to make Eastern Europe – specifically Russia – 'the field for socialist experiments'. These events were aggravated by the failure of the Central European peoples in their own world-historical task, to 'rise to a broad sense of vision' as intermediaries between the two groups. Throughout, Steiner refers to the work of individual Folk Souls, but distinguishes them from the scourge of nationalism – especially when it is based on blood – whilst emphasizing the sovereignty of the individual human being. Although more than a century old, the enduring themes of these previously-untranslated lectures will resonate with many readers today. The main text is supplemented with an introduction by Simon Blaxland-de Lange, editorial notes and an index. Sixteen lectures, Stuttgart, Sept. 1914–March 1921, GA 174b

A Supernatural War
A Supernatural War

Author: Owen Davies

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 019879455X

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How widespread belief in fortune-telling, prophecies, spirits, magic, and protective talismans gripped the battlefields and home fronts of Europe during the First World War.

Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany During the First World War
Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany During the First World War

Author: Jason Crouthamel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350083704

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This book explores the impact of violence on the religious beliefs of front soldiers and civilians in Germany during the First World War. The central argument is that religion was the main prism through which men and women in the Great War articulated and processed trauma. Inspired by trauma studies, the history of emotions, and the social and cultural history of religion, this book moves away from the history of clerical authorities and institutions at war and instead focuses on the history of religion and war 'from below.' Jason Crouthamel provides a fascinating exploration into the language and belief systems used by ordinary people to explain the inexplicable. From Judeo-Christian traditions to popular beliefs and 'superstitions,' German soldiers and civilians depended on a malleable psychological toolbox that included a hybrid of ideas stitched together using prewar concepts mixed with images or experiences derived from the surreal environment of modern combat. Perhaps most interestingly, studying the front experience exposes not only lived religion, but also how religious beliefs are invented. Front soldiers in particular constructed new, subjective spiritual and religious concepts based on encounters with industrialized weapons, the sacred experience of comradeship, and immersion in mass death, which profoundly altered their sense of self and the supernatural. More than just a coping mechanism, religious language and beliefs enabled victims, and perpetrators, of violence to narrate concepts of psychological renewal and rebirth. In the wake of defeat and revolution, religious concepts shaped by the war experience also became a cornerstone of visions for radical political movements, including the National Socialists, to transform a shattered and embittered German nation. Making use of letters between soldiers and civilians, diaries, memoirs and front newspapers, Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War offers a unique glimpse into the belief systems of men and women at a turning point in European history.

The Russian Origins of the First World War
The Russian Origins of the First World War

Author: Sean McMeekin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-05-06

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0674072332

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The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

The Second World War
The Second World War

Author: Martin Gilbert

Publisher: Rosetta Books

Published: 2014-06-05

Total Pages: 1071

ISBN-13: 0795337299

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“Mr. Gilbert brings the strongest possible credentials to his history of World War II, and the result is a magisterial work” (The New York Times). In the hands of master historian Martin Gilbert, the complex and compelling story of the Second World War comes to life. This narrative captures the perspectives of leading politicians and war commanders, journalists, civilians, and ordinary soldiers, offering gripping eyewitness accounts of heroism, defeat, suffering, and triumph. This is one of the first historical studies of World War II that describes the Holocaust as an integral part of the war. It also covers maneuvers, strategies, and leaders operating in European, Asian, and Pacific theatres. In addition, this book brings in survivor testimonies of occupation, survival behind enemy lines, and the experience of minority groups such as the Roma in Europe, to offer a comprehensive account of the war’s impact on individuals on both sides. This is a sweeping narrative of one of the most deadly wars in history, which took almost forty million lives, and irrevocably changed countless more. “Gilbert’s flowing narrative is spiced with anecdotal details culled from diaries, memoirs, and official documents. He is especially skillful at interweaving summaries of military strategy with vignettes of civilian suffering.” —Newsweek “[A] masterful account of history’s most destructive conflict.” —Publishers Weekly

Spiritual Politics
Spiritual Politics

Author: Mark Silk

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1989-04-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 067167563X

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About religion and politics in the United States after 1945.

A History of the School of Spiritual Science
A History of the School of Spiritual Science

Author: Johannes Kiersch

Publisher: Temple Lodge Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9781902636801

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The School of Spiritual Science and its individual sections was initiated by Rudolf Steiner at the Christmas Conference (1923-1924). His intention, in his own words, was to present "the esoteric aspect." It was to have three classes, though only the First Class was instituted before Steiner's death in 1925. Recently, the written records on which the teaching of the First Class is based have been published in both German and English, which has given rise to a number of questions. Consequently, the council of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland, commissioned Johannes Kiersch to write a history of this unique organization. The result is an overview of the First Class and its development, from the early esotericism developed by Rudolf Steiner while still connected with the Theosophical Society, to the period following World War II. The author provides individual commentaries on the first "mediators" of the school, including Lili Kolisko, Harry Collison, and Count Polzer-Hoditz. The book also presents some thirty-seven original documents in an extensive appendix, which features personal notes, letters, and speeches connected with the Esoteric School. A History of the School of Spiritual Science presents a balanced history of the birth and development of the First Class and its struggles through the controversial splits and conflicts that followed Steiner's death. As Kiersch states, "The aim has been, above all, to come as close as possible to the sources and offer historical material for individuals to form their own opinion."