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Catholicism and Historical Narrative: A Catholic Engagement with Historical Scholarship . Edited by Kevin Schmiesing. Catholic Social Thought 8. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. x + 215 pp. $75.00 cloth.

This collection of nine essays presents avowedly confessional—and sometimes pugilistic—Roman Catholic interpretation of historical events from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, primarily in the United States. Following a brief introduction by the editor, the first essay, by Paul Radzilowski, seeks to articulate the volume’s methodology by discussing what he terms the “dilemmas of the Catholic historian” (1). These dilemmas center on what Radzilowski takes to be conflicts between mainstream academic historiographical method and the “explicitly Christian frame of interpretation” of “all good Catholic history” (5). Despite his acknowledgment of “what is good about the modern historical discipline,” Radzilowski and the majority of his fellow contributors present themselves as opposed to what they deem the secularizing, particularizing, and anti-Catholic tendencies of contemporary historical writing; this approach largely shapes the topics, sources, and conclusions of their essays. Their method has the effect of rendering Catholicism static and monochromatic, since these essays by and large are willing to call Catholic only that which concords with official church teachings—a standard that minimizes the interplay of Catholic and nonCatholic ideas over time and also excludes many expressions of Catholic culture. A few essays, especially Clement Anthony Mulloy’s on the birth control debates of the early twentieth century, John F. Quinn’s on nineteenthcentury Newport, and Adam Tate’s on the National Jubilee of 1826, buck this trend, presenting nuanced and well-contextualized accounts of their material. The volume overall, however, is less an engagement with mainstream historical scholarship than a jeremiad against it.