A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America

"In this book, Jonathan Ebel focuses on the Great War and the jolt it delivered to devout young American Christian soldiers. How were they to interpret this bloodletting and their own role in it? Where was God in the vast and terrible story of war? Where was God in relation to America? With keen sensitivity, Ebel takes up these and other questions. His book adds a fascinating and indispensable chapter to the scholarship on World War I."—Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Sovereignty: God, State, and Self

"In this beautiful and poignant book, Jonathan Ebel draws on the letters and diaries of American soldiers of the First World War to illuminate how they understood their service to be a religious calling. Anyone who thinks about the morality of war must read this book."—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University Divinity School

"Employing a wide variety of sources, Jonathan Ebel reconstructs the religious meaning of World War I for American soldiers and civilians, and his findings are highly revisionary. The conventional wisdom has been that the Civil War was the last 'romantic' war and that cynicism and disillusionment have ruled ever since. Yet when Ebel actually looks at the evidence, a very different picture emerges—one of deep-seated faith and an idealistic belief in America as a Christian nation."—Harry S. Stout, Yale University