New Books In Religion

The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are working to understand how Christians looked at the outside world at various moments in U.S. history, how they understood their actions to be in line with their faith, and their actions shaped both domestic politics and foreign policy. Heather Curtis’ Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, published by Harvard University Press in 2018 contributes to this burgeoning field by analyzing what motivated evangelical humanitarian aid in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To tell this story, Dr. Curtis focuses on one intra-denominational Christian newspaper, the Christian Herald. Founded in 1878, the Christian Herald was founded in part out of concern that the American Protestant community was becoming divided over doctrinal disputes and an underlying fear that the Christian identity of the United States was being undermined. International