Constantine's Sword

In this ?rare book that combines searing passion . . . with a subject that has affected all of our lives? (Chicago Tribune), the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own [...]
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In this ?rare book that combines searing passion . . . with a subject that has affected all of our lives? (Chicago Tribune), the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life as a Catholic. ?Fascinating, brave and sometimes infuriating? (Time), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture.Drawing on his well-known talents as a storyteller and memoirist, Carroll has created ?a deeply felt work, a book that measures the ?sweep of history' against [his] experience as a man of the church? (San Francisco Chronicle). A courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths that will touch every reader, ?Constantine's Sword is a history written to change the way people live? (Talk). Author Biography: James Carroll was born in Chicago in 1943 and raised in Washington, D.C., where his father was an Air Force general and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was educated at Washington's Priory School and at an American high school in Wiesbaden, Germany. He attended Georgetown University before entering St. Paul's College, the Paulist Fathers' seminary, where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees. Carroll has been a civil rights worker, an antiwar activist, and a community organizer in Washington and New York. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1969. Carroll served as Catholic chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974. During that time, he studied poetry with George Starbuck and published books on religious subjects and a book of poems. He was also a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter (1972-1975) and was named Best Columnist by the Catholic Press Association. For his writing on religion and politics he received the first Thomas Merton Award from Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center in 1972. Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer, and in 1974 was a playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival. His plays have been produced at the BTF and at Boston's Next Move Theater. In 1976 he published his first novel, MADONNA RED, which was followed by—among others—MORTAL FRIENDS (1978), PRINCE OF PEACE (1984), and MEMORIAL BRIDGE (1991). THE CITY BELOW (1994) is now available in a Houghton Mifflin trade-paperback edition. He has written for numerous publications, including THE NEW YORKER, and his op-ed column appears weekly in the BOSTON GLOBE. He won a National Book Award for AN AMERICAN REQUIEM. James Carroll lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall, and their two children.