Author to Host Discussion, Book Signing on New Civil War Book

INDIANAPOLIS - During an upcoming lecture at IUPUI, Yale University Professor Harry S. Stout will discuss his latest book, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War.

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, part of the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, will present Stout's lecture at 6 p.m. on April 5, 2007, in LE101, with a book sale and signing outside LE101 beginning at 5:15 p.m. The lecture is open to the public.

Stout, a professor of history, religious studies and American studies, is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity at Yale.

In a review of Upon the Altar of the Nation, Publishers Weekly wrote: “Starred Review. In the Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers alike marched to battle believing God was on their side. Stout, professor of American religious history at Yale (The New England Soul), artfully and eloquently examines the evolving rhetoric of warfare, both Northern and Confederate, within the rubric of ‘the just war' theory of conflict. Stout dissects such public documents as editorials, sermons and speeches, and private documents like diaries and letters, to trace the trajectory of both sides' rationales for war.

“Stout argues that even today the moral justifications for the carnage ring louder than do the sordid dollar-and-cents realities that underlay sectional differences.”

Stout's previous books include The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England and The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.