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General and Miscellaneous Faith and the Historian: Catholic Perspectives. Edited by Nick Salvatore. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2007. Pp. x, 196. $60.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-252-03143-4; $25.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-252-07382-3)
In my first year of graduate studies I encountered a professor who had a bias against church history. In her historiographical view the moment the words church (particularly Catholic Church) and history were connected, propaganda, rather than true history, emerged. The eight essays in this volume edited by Nick Salvatore of Cornell University provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between Catholic faith and the writing of history. The volume resulted from a March 2001 meeting of historians gathered at Cornell to explore how an experience with Catholicism had affected their approach to history. The eight historians published in this volume are of various ages (birthdates from 1927 to 1959) and range from practicing cradle-to-grave Catholics to former Catholics. The common thread was that each was a historian "for whom Catholicism...