Search results for ""Author Canon Professor Michael Snape""

An authoritative and timely book shedding new light on the role of religion during World War II and its impact on post-war American society. America's armed forces played a critical part in the defeat of Hitler's Germany and made by far the biggest contribution to the Allied defeat of Japan. In the US, military veterans of World War II are widely revered as the foremost representatives of 'the greatest generation', a generation that vanquished fascism in Europe and the Far East, faced down the threat of communism during the Cold War, and achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social mobility in their own society. Elsewhere, America's service men and women are often remembered more ambivalently for their material abundance, their hedonism, and even their rapacity. God and Uncle Sam shows that bothperspectives are problematic: America's armed forces were the products of one of the most diverse and dynamic religious cultures in the western world and were the largest ever to be raised by a professedly religious society. Despite constitutional constraints, a pre-war 'religious depression', and the myriad pitfalls of war, religion played a crucial role in helping more than sixteen million uniformed Americans through the ordeal of World War II, a fact that had profound and far-reaching implications for the religious development of post-war America. This timely and authoritative book draws on meticulous research in US archives and is informed by contemporary films, photographs, posters, and sound recordings. MICHAEL SNAPE is Michael Ramsey Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University.

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Examines the role of Christianity in British statecraft, politics, media, the armed forces and in the education and socialization of the young during the Second World War. This volume presents a major reappraisal of the role of Christianity in Great Britain between 1939 and 1945, examining the influence of Christianity on British society, statecraft, politics, the media, the armed forces, and on the education and socialization of the young. Its chapters address themes such as the spiritual mobilization of nation and empire; the limitations of Mass Observation's commentary on wartime religious life; Catholic responses to strategic bombing; servicemen and the dilemma of killing; the development of Christian-Jewish relations, and the predicament of British military chaplains in Germany in the summer of 1945. By demonstrating the enduring -even renewed- importance of Christianity in British national life, British Christianity and the Second World War also sets the scene for some major post-war developments. Though the war years triggered a 'resacralization' of British society and culture, inherent racism meant that the exalted self-image of Christian Britain proved sadly deceptive for post-war immigrants from the Caribbean. Wartime confidence in the prospective role of the state in religious education soon transpired to be ill-founded, while the profound upheavals of war -and even the bromides of 'BBC Religion'- were, in the longer term, corrosive of conventional religious practice and traditional denominational loyalties. This volume will be of interest to historians of British society and the Second World War, twentieth-century British religion, and the perennial interplay of religion and conflict.

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