| Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early
Republic examines how Catholics in the early nineteenth-century Ohio
Valley-despite the evangelical success of the Protestant faith during the Second
Great Awakening-expanded their church, strengthened their connections to Rome,
and sought fellowship with their non-Catholic neighbors.
Using extensive correspondence, reports, diaries, court documents,
apologetical works, and other records of the Catholic clergy, John R. Dichtl
shows how Catholic leadership successfully pursued strategies of growth in
frontier regions while continually weighing major decisions against established
Protestant doctrine. Frontiers of Faith helps restore Catholicism to
the story of religious development in the Early Republic and emphasizes the
importance of clerical and lay efforts to make sacred the landscape of the New
West.
John R. Dichtl is executive director of the National Council
on Public History and former deputy executive director of the Organization of
American Historians.
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