For God and Liberty

Reviews / Votes

For God and Liberty definitively and artfully overturns the secularization thesis with respect to Latin America's great Independence movements. At the heart of the nineteenth-century wars of Independence was a sprawling, transatlantic religious conflict that pitted two different visions for the future of the church: one imperial, papal, and monarchical and the other regional, democratically governed, and laicized. Pamela Voekel expounds this grand thesis with unrivaled archival acuity and skill. Historians of religion, politics, democracy, and secularism will be reckoning with Voekel's magnum opus for decades to come. * Jennifer Scheper Hughes, author of The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas * A riveting, argumentative account of subversive Catholic thought and action as the vital clue to understanding Latin American independence and early republicanism. With particularly illuminating research on Central America, it invites consequential debate regarding politics on the cusp of transcendence. * Brian Connaughton, author of The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation, 1788-1853 * Pamela Voekel's For God and Liberty is a tour de force. Her research spans religious and secular archives throughout the vast Catholic world of the Age of Revolution and its aftermath. Providing a micro-level analysis of the Catholic intellectuals and social actors within Mexico and Central America, she offers a transatlantic account of a stunning network of revolutionary and conservative lay and religious social actors whose participation in the rapidly changing political and religious life of Latin America and the world was defined by the language, history and intellectual currents of Catholicism...For God and Liberty provides a fascinating read, and is worthy of intense study. * Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, ReVista * This is an important book; it deserved better attention in the final stages of production. * Donald F. Stevens, Church History * In this ambitious book, Pamela Voekel joins a revisionist historiographical trend that emphasizes the centrality of religion in the so-called Age of Revolutions in Spanish America...Voekel's book will offer a helpful guide in answering it. * Pablo Mijangos Y Gonza? Lez, Hispanic American Historical Review * For God and Liberty is the work of a judicious historian with a firm command of a wealth of primary and secondary sources. Much to her credit, she can tell a story well. This important book deserves to be read not just by Catholic historians, but also by students of modern Latin America's political and social history. * Ben Fallaw, Catholic Historical Review * For God and Liberty is a valuable addition to a burgeoning field of study. Scholars interested in the Age of Revolutions, nineteenth-century Latin America, and the interplay of religion and politics in the modern world would be well advised to procure a copy. * Glauco Schettini, H-Diplo * Voekel's book is a true tour de force of researchprowess, intellectual insights, and clever prose. It willreorient the stature of many subfields' debates andshould cause all of us to rewrite our classroom lectures. * Karen Racine, American Historical Review *