Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America

摘要

Ronit Y. Stahl, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, has written a detailed and fascinating book on the American military chaplaincy. Of the piles of books on military topics that authors, historians, analysts, and academics publish each year, books on emergent military technology, historical battles, and biography dominate the stacks; religion and the chaplain corps responsible for tending to servicemem-bers' ecumenical needs tend to get short shrift. And when religious matters-and in particular chaplains-are written about, these works often focus on larger matters of ethics or morality in military service. Thus, it is welcome to see Stahl's scholarly work on a military specialty that is one of the smallest across all military services but whose effect on servicemembers and their culture is often directly inverse to its size.