The Journal of Military History

The product of a conference on "Military Chaplains in Their Contexts" hosted by the University of Notre Dame in March 2000, The Sword of the Lord merits a place on the bookshelf for its extensive mapping out of the fairly confined terrain of chaplain studies. The twelve essays gathered here by Doris Bergen, covering a range of locations, time periods, and topics as disparate as "Protestant Prussian Military Chaplains, 1713-1918," "Military Chaplains in the Roman Empire," and more recent U.S. and Canadian chaplains, are a welcome addition to this too often neglected aspect of military and religious history.

Contributors include ten historians, one theologian, and two former military chaplains. Taken together their essays do not quite comprise the "first book to examine military chaplains" and the "development of military chaplaincy across time and space, from the first through the twentieth century," (p. 1), as editor Doris Bergen hoped they would. Nevertheless, while that more systematic history awaits writing, Bergen has assembled a helpful and necessary step in that direction. Moreover, she has identified a set of four recurring themes among these essays: chaplaincy's historical development; the relationships between chaplains and those they serve; chaplains' "precarious position" as both religious and military figures (including issues related to masculinity); and the moral and theological dilemmas raised by military chaplains. These four points, illustrated in the various essays, constitute a roadmap for additional scholarship on chaplains.

Several of the essays either update earlier work on chaplains, or are revisions of the contributors' earlier scholarship. Ralph W. Mathisen's article on military chaplains in the Roman Empire more than doubles the existing scholarship on the subject, a thin 1953 article by A. H. M. Jones, and illuminates the institutionalized religious life of the Roman imperial military. Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., revisits his 1987 study of Civil War religiosity with his nuanced examination of how "Civil war chaplains operated not only as an official representative of the war effort" but also a contradictory figure who "at times implicitly undermin[ed] the martial aspirations" of his country (p. 106). Similarly, Duff Crerar updates his exhaustive study of Canadian chaplains in the First World War, reclaiming the "Padre" from postwar cynicism that often caricatured chaplains as ineffective and undervalued.

Doris Bergen reprints her 2001 article on Second World War chaplains in the German military, offering a cautionary tale of chaplains showing "intense loyalty" (p. 175) to an immoral cause (despite the "hostility they encountered from military, state, and [Nazi] party authorities," p. 173). Anne C. Loveland describes a post-Vietnam shift in U.S. chaplains' duties from morale building to moral guidance. That essay, combined with her 2000 JMH article on "Character Education in the U.S. Army, 1947-1977," [End Page 1243] and a 1996 book, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993, comprise a useful (and under-appreciated) study on religious and other cultural changes within the U.S. military.

Not surprisingly, the most interesting essays are those contributed by former chaplains Rabbi Max B. Wall and Father Joseph F. O'Donnell. Chaplain Wall's work with Jewish refugees and other Displaced Persons in Europe at the end of World War Two is at times as dramatic as Chaplain O'Donnell's stories of ministry to the dead and wounded over the course of his two tours in Vietnam. Both chaplains recount instances of the uniquely interfaith ministry chaplains often perform, in Rabbi Wall's case including preaching for an Easter service in Bavaria in 1946. The U.S. military's ability to facilitate the religious free exercise of its service members celebrated by these two chaplains promises to be a continuing challenge for a U.S. military experiencing "increasing religious diversity" (p. 227).

While some of the issues chaplains have faced and duties they have...