September 2026

Over the past three centuries, belief in extraterrestrial life has had a profound influence on American religion. Faith in Space examines the key thinkers and religious leaders throughout American history who built faith communities around the notion that we are not alone in the universe, and that the path to spiritual truth leads heavenward to the stars.

Paul Gutjahr reveals the pivotal role Protestant Christianity played in the formation of extraterrestrial belief in many of these traditions, sharing new perspectives on prominent Americans such as Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Paine. He goes on to examine familiar religious movements such as Spiritualism, Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Scientology, the Nation of Islam, and Heaven’s Gate as well as lesser-known belief systems such as Swedenborgianism, Theosophy, the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, and Ashtar Command. Gutjahr shows how prophetic figures in these traditions created rich cosmological tapestries for their followers, bridging the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial with their spiritual insights.

A panoramic work of scholarship, Faith in Space traces how these traditions have offered generations of Americans cosmically oriented religious thinking through the belief in alien life, propounding a view that humanity’s salvation is inextricably tied to the actions and interventions of intelligent beings from other worlds.

When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of the French Catholic Church. In a country where more than 80 percent of citizens were Catholic, bishops held enormous moral sway. During the 1930s, many used their positions to forcefully condemn the rise of Nazism. But as the persecution of Jews escalated during the Occupation, every bishop in France maintained a deafening silence. In fact, the Church stood publicly alongside Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime. Even when bishops famously broke silence to protest the deportation of Jews in 1942—a moment long remembered as one of moral awakening—they quickly retreated, discouraging further defiance.

The French Church’s public silence during the Holocaust is no secret. But as Aliza Luft shows, private interactions between bishops, French Jewish leaders, and Vichy officials were just as consequential. Turning to letters, diaries, and records of private conversations, Luft traces the moral dilemmas and calculated choices that shaped these hidden negotiations. As Jewish leaders turned to the Church for information and protection, bishops repeatedly assured them of the Church’s sympathy and support. These guarantees from the nation’s highest moral authorities, combined with the false promises of Vichy officials, encouraged French Jews to place their faith in relationships and republican ideals that proved tragically hollow.

Drawing on years of archival research, Sacred Betrayal is a harrowing account of how genocide unfolds day by day—not only through spectacular violence, but also through misleading assurances, quiet capitulations, and broken promises.

While the modern university is typically viewed as secular, Joel R. Iliff argues in The Great Communion of Scholars that the Protestant architects of the modern university in both the U.S. South and Germany consciously patterned their creation on the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints. By attempting to counteract the perceived secularization of their societies, a network of Awakened Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to the development of modern institutions of higher education and attendant notions of intellectual and moral authority.

Beginning in the 1820s, white southern evangelicals looked abroad and found allies among contemporary religious Awakening movements in Germany. Evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans shared a desire to restore not only intellectual and spiritual order but also social and political order in the wake of the lingering upheavals wrought by the Enlightenment. Eventually, southerners drew analogies between their domestic opponents in the North and the opponents of the Awakened, thus creating the perception of a transatlantic battle between infidelity and orthodoxy, of which the American sectional conflict became one theater. This discourse culminated in the revolutions of 1848 and the American Civil War, which both evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans interpreted as religious struggles with global ramifications.

Ultimately, the transnational, ecumenical impulse that fueled the communion of scholars, which reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth century, proved unstable. It fatefully collapsed over the issue of American slavery when Black evangelical abolitionists in the North waged a successful campaign to brand southern slaveholders, ironically enough, as analogous to the religious radicals and infidels that conservative Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic so feared. By exploring the role that antebellum evangelicalism played in the development of the modern university, Iliff not only dismantles much of what we think we know about the South, American religion, and the origins of the modern higher education but also recovers a lost period in Western intellectual history.

We Will Receive Justice explores how Native people in the southern San Francisco Bay Area—the ancestors of today’s Ohlone community—navigated the collapse of the California mission system. The volume spans from Mexican independence in 1821 through the region’s annexation by the United States in 1846, as Native people from Mission Santa Clara and Mission San José fought for emancipation and restitution amid rapidly changing colonial circumstances.

The narrative is driven by a reexamination of archives related to the Pueblo of San José, the territorial capital of Monterey, and early U.S. court cases regarding Mexican-era land grants, contextualized through an in-depth analysis of mission records that illuminate the complex social connections of Native individuals and families. We Will Receive Justice offers an ethnohistorical lens for viewing the Indigenous history of Mexican California, examining not simply the history of colonization but how Native people drew on cultural traditions and social relationships to create new lives for themselves in the wake of the Franciscan mission system.

Why has South Korea long been heralded as a Christian "success story" when only about 30 percent of its population identifies as Christian? Forging Protestant Allies shows that the popularization of South Korea's image as a Protestant stronghold took shape during the Korean War.

As the conflict unfolded, mission societies and faith-based aid agencies in the United States sought to overcome American indifference toward a distant and unfamiliar country. To mobilize sympathy and support, they reimagined South Korea as a Christian ally on the front lines of the global struggle against communism. In this context, "forging" operated in two distinct ways. First, the war fostered new partnerships: not only between Korean churches and Western Protestant organizations, but also among the many mission boards, denominational agencies, and ecumenical relief groups that converged on the peninsula. These collaborations were real and often consequential. But "forging" also captures a second process—crafting an appearance of unity that belied realities on the ground. Mission societies and aid agencies emphasized shared purpose while downplaying substantive theological disagreements, institutional rivalries, and persistent hierarchies of race, nation, and power. In this dual sense the book traces how the idea of a unified Protestant front in Korea was forged.

Drawing on extensive archival research conducted across four continents, Forging Protestant Allies uncovers the tensions beneath proclamations of unity. It follows how mission societies negotiated jurisdictional boundaries, how mainline and evangelical agencies contested the purpose of aid, and—crucially—how Korean Christian leaders leveraged this Cold War attention to challenge missionary hierarchies, break old alliances, and forge new transnational partnerships on their own terms.

Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy offers a captivating journey through the history of religious rituals in Western Europe, showcasing the profound impact of Christian liturgy on art, literature, music, and architecture. Through ten evocative stories, it explores medieval rituals and their cultural influence up to the present day, providing fresh insights into the enduring legacy of the liturgy as an expression of human emotion and religious experience. Accessible to all, this guide provides translations and explanations to uncover the hidden treasures of ancient rites and their lasting significance, appealing to those seeking a deeper understanding of Western liturgical traditions.

In The Wickedest Man in New York, Robert E. Cray revisits one of the most arresting episodes in nineteenth-century Manhattan: the brief season when a Water Street dancehall became the unlikely stage for a public religious drama. In 1868, journalist Oliver Dyer published a sensational profile of John Allen, a dancehall proprietor whose establishment was infamous for liquor, music, and the labor of the sex workers who lived there. Dyer's portrait of Allen as "the wickedest man in New York" gripped the city and pulled thousands of curious onlookers toward the Fourth Ward, a waterfront district long associated with poverty, sex work, and the tensions of a changing metropolis.

As evangelicals from the Howard Mission entered Allen's world—hoping to reform the neighborhood, cultivate converts, and elevate their own ministry—reporters chronicled every turn. Prayer meetings unfolded where sailors once crowded the floor. Critics questioned motives. Supporters heralded moral transformation. New Yorkers asked whether a revival was truly taking place or whether they were witnessing a carefully managed spectacle shaped as much by publicity as by faith. Cray brings this volatile moment into sharp focus, revealing how Protestant evangelicals, urban journalists, and neighborhood residents navigated overlapping ambitions in a city alive with religious competition and cultural display.

Through careful attention to Water Street's social landscape—including its Irish Catholic families, its laboring men, and the women whose lives were most exposed to public scrutiny—Cray shows how personalities like Allen and Dyer became symbols of broader struggles over morality, reform, and the power of the press. The Wickedest Man in New York illuminates the forces that shaped urban religion in the early Gilded Age, offering a compelling portrait of a city captivated by sin, salvation, and sensational newsmaking.

Faith under Fascism: Catholic Sisters in Nazi Germany reveals the vital role religious women played in confronting, navigating, and ultimately outlasting the Third Reich. Focusing on the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Martina Cucchiara restores nearly 92,000 Catholic sisters—long overshadowed by priests—to the history of Catholicism under Nazism.

As teachers, the sisters encountered the Nazi regime daily in classrooms that became contested sites where Catholic faith, Nazi ideology, and the futures of Catholic and Jewish children intersected. Far from passive victims, the sisters engaged Nazi ideas selectively, creating temporary sanctuaries for Jewish students while also easing Catholic girls’ participation in the Nazi state. Their experiences complicate simple narratives of resistance and collaboration, revealing a history marked by endurance, adaptation, and moral tension.

By tracing the regime’s sustained campaign within and against Catholic schools and religious communities, Cucchiara also intervenes in debates about Nazi intentions toward the churches. Drawing on rich archival sources and the sisters’ lived experience, Faith under Fascism demonstrates that the regime sought not coexistence but the gradual destruction of religious life. Highlighting the sisters’ tenacious perseverance and the ways their everyday actions frustrated the regime’s efforts to suppress Catholic institutions, the book reshapes our understanding of Catholicism and German society under Nazism.

In the first half of the 20th century, the reputation of American Catholics among European intellectuals was not so good. Didn't the novelist Flannery O'Connor write that their main concern was to "install central heating in holy places"? This book reveals a page in the intellectual history of American Catholicism that has sometimes been overlooked, and shows another, more flattering side of transatlantic relations. "It is in the order of spirit and culture that the Atlantic community assumes its most fundamental historical importance", as Jacques Maritain noted. Before many European intellectuals found themselves in exile in New York between 1940 and 1945, and long before the influence of "French Theory" in the United States, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, Charles De Koninck and Yves Simon taught in North America between the wars and founded institutes in Toronto, Notre Dame, Laval, Princeton, destined to play a decisive role in the intellectual mutations of North American Catholicism and beyond. To trace the history of these philosophers, Florian Michel had access to archives in France, Italy, the USA and Canada, and he lays out the story with clarity and in a level of detail heretofore unseen in the English-speaking literature.

Why do the most powerful men in the West wear sober, understated attire? Until the “Great Masculine Renunciation” in the eighteenth century, luxurious and often flamboyant clothing signaled social superiority for men as well as women.

Margaret Waller’s fresh account of this historic recalibration of gender and class centers on an unlikely pair: Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart who crowned himself emperor of France, and Pierre Antoine Le Boux La Mésangère, the defrocked priest who became Europe’s premier fashion editor. Looking at knee breeches, schoolboy and officer uniforms, priests’ robes, and imperial regalia, this book shows how misogyny and homophobia helped make Bonaparte, La Mésangère, and their peers men.

Napoleon’s Closet shows when male fashion editors first associated women with fashion and urged men to renounce “feminine” frivolity in their dress. It connects French revolutionaries’ masculinist construction of citizenship to the Church’s long-standing requirement that its rank and file wear plain, modest clothing. It demonstrates that although Napoleon’s reinstitution of sumptuous uniforms for men might seem the exception, he reserved for himself the modern male privilege of dressing down.

A lively and unorthodox exploration of the paradoxical history of male clothing, this book unveils the origins of modern ideas about normative masculinity, queerness, and “the closet.”

Church History: Books of the Month

September 2026

Monthly Updates on Recent Books in the History of Christianity

Paul C. Gutjahr, Faith in Space: American Religious Belief in Extraterrestrial Life, Princeton University Press, 2026

Aliza Luft, Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews During the Holocaust, Harvard University Press, 2026

Joel R. Iliff, The Great Communion of Scholars: Evangelical Southerners and the Birth of Modern Intellectual Authority, Louisiana State University Press, 2026

Lee M. Panich and Gustavo Flores, We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions, University of Nebraska Press, 2026

Paul S. Cha, Forging Protestant Allies: How the Cold War Recast South Korea as a Landscape of Christian Vitality, Oxford University Press, 2026

Cosima Clara Gillhammer, Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy, Reaktion Books, 2025

Robert E. Cray, The Wickedest Man in New York: Faith, Sensationalism, and the Water Street Sham Revival of 1868, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026

Martina Cucchiara, Faith Under Fascism: Catholic Sisters in Nazi Germany, Notre Dame Press, 2026

Florian Michel, trans. Msgr. Gerald E. Twaddell, KCHS, Voyages of Catholic Thought Between Europe and North America, 1920-1960, Catholic University of America Press, 2026

Margaret Waller, Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion, Columbia University Press, 2026