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Exegetically noteworthy and culturally-theologically relevant

Violence in its wide range of horrifying expressions is real in people’s lives, and biblical interpreters must take violence in the world seriously to arrive at relevant ideas about the place of the Bible in the world. Each essay addresses people’s experiences of violence in the study of the Bible through the context of la violencia, the Spanish noun referring to the brutal, repressive, and murderous policies of state-sponsored violence practiced in many South and Central American and Caribbean countries during the twentieth century that external powers such as the USA often endorsed and fostered. The volume represents an important contribution to biblical studies and to the field of Latina/o studies. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Pablo Andiñach, Nancy Bedford, Lee Cuéllar, Steed V. Davidson, Serge Frolov, Renata Furst, Julia M. O’Brien, Todd Penner, José Enrique Ramírez, Ivoni Richter Reimer, and Susanne Scholz.

Features:

• Twelve essays by scholars living and working on the American continent
• Articles reveal the complex historical, political, and cultural conditions on the American continent that have contributed to our understanding of violence in the Bible
• Focus on themes of racial, social, and cultural violence

No Church is monolithic—this is the preliminary premise of this volume on the public place of religion in a representative number of post-communist countries. The studies confirm that within any religious organization we can expect to find fissures, factions, theological or ideological quarrels, and perhaps even competing interest groups, such as missionary workers, regular clergy versus secular clergy, and sometimes even competing ecclesiastical hierarchies. The main focus of the book rests on the divisions arising within select Christian Churches, as they confront the processes of secularization and atheization. The coverage area includes Russia and the Ukraine, East-Central Europe and South-Eastern Europe. Some chapters focus on individual clergy who challenge the mainstream of their given Church either from a more liberal or from a more conservative perspective, while others deal with the divisive forces impacting the religious organizations.

This festschrift to honor Sabrina Ramet’s seminal contribution to the study of religion in the politics of the communist and post-communist world, brings together several generations of scholars from a variety of countries, both those well established in their fields of study as well as young promising academics.

From the congressional debate over the “fall of China” to the drama of the Army–McCarthy hearings to the kitchen faceoff between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, the political history of the early Cold War was long dominated by studies of presidential administrations, anticommunism, and foreign policy. In Liberty and Justice for All? a group of distinguished historians representing a variety of disciplinary perspectives—social history, cultural history, intellectual history, labor history, urban history, women's history, African American studies, and media studies—expand on the political history of the early Cold War by rethinking the relationship between politics and culture. How, for example, did folk music help to keep movement culture alive throughout the 1950s? How did the new medium of television change fundamental assumptions about politics and the electorate? How did American experiences with religion in the 1950s strengthen the separation of church and state? How did race, class, and gender influence the relationship between citizens and the state? These are just some of the questions addressed in this wide-ranging set of essays.

In addition to volume editor Kathleen G. Donohue, contributors include Howard Brick, Kari Frederickson, Andrea Friedman, David Greenberg, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jennifer Klein, Laura McEnaney, Kevin M. Schultz, Jason Scott Smith, Landon R. Y. Storrs, and Jessica Weiss.

While working on his first book, Bob Korkuc became intimately familiar with the 381st Bombardment Group of the Mighty Eighth Air Force and met the group’s chaplain, James Good Brown. Brown kept a diary during his time with the bomb group (1943 to 1945) in which he chronicled the daily experiences of the men. 

Years after the war, Brown self-published his diary, which today is hard to find. Through his friendship with Brown, Korkuc gained access to and chose to edit the original docu - ment so that more readers might appreciate this insightful wartime eyewitness account. 

Serving in his early forties alongside men twenty years his junior—whom he called the “Mighty Men of the 381st”—Brown took part in morning briefings, shared meals with crews, and anxiously awaited their return from dangerous daylight bombing missions. Flying as a noncombatant, an unnecessary eleventh crewmember, Brown describes his own observations of a Flying Fortress combat mission over Germany. Writing with extraordinary candor, Brown documents the inner workings of a bomb group that flew 297 combat missions over Europe, providing vivid character assessments of his fellow airmen and capturing both their victories and devastating losses. 

In addition to judiciously editing Brown’s original diary for readability, Korkuc created a unique appendix, which reveals the fate of every airman who served with Brown. The immediacy of Brown’s narration combined with Korkuc’s meticulous editing make this a promising new resource for scholars and general readers alike.
 
 

Tracing how shuttered mission schools became contested commemorative landscapes

During the Early Republic and Jacksonian eras, Euro-American colonists and Native nations in the South and Old Northwest established mission schools intended to Christianize Indigenous peoples. In Lost Missions, Sean T. Jacobson recovers the histories and afterlives of these institutions, arguing that they played a far more consequential role in Native–settler relations than scholars have previously acknowledged. Mission schools advanced a spiritual vision of a multiethnic Christian America—one that ultimately collapsed amid the federally sponsored Indian Removal campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s.

Following the closure of these schools, their physical and symbolic landscapes became powerful sites of memory. Euro-American Christians later transformed former missions into commemorative spaces that celebrated “frontier” piety and national expansion. Through monuments, pageantry, and local histories, Protestant and Catholic Americans alike recast missionary labor as a foundational component of American nation-building. In doing so, these narratives framed the Christianization of Native peoples as a benevolent civilizing project, one that implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—sanitized the coercion, dispossession, and violence that accompanied westward expansion and the forced removal of Indigenous nations.

By the late twentieth century, however, these commemorative narratives faded. Suburban development, commercialization, and shifting cultural priorities rendered many mission sites once again “lost,” stripped of the civic meaning they once held. Yet Jacobson shows that these landscapes still speak, especially when viewed from Indigenous perspectives. Reinterpreted through Native histories of endurance and survival, former missions reveal counternarratives of persistence amid profound loss. As tribal nations increasingly engage with these sites today, Lost Missions probes their contested status as places of memory and conscience, illuminating how public history continues to shape and challenge understandings of America’s colonial past.