Civil War and Sacred Ground

Moral Reflections on War

Speakers

Mark Noll was a member of the Wheaton College history department for twenty-seven years before becoming the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His books include The Civil War as a Theological Crisis(University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002). With Luke Harlow he edited Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2007). His articles on the religion of Abraham Lincoln have appeared in the Journal of Presbyterian History and the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Tracy McKenzie taught for twenty-two years at the University of Washington, where he held the Donald Logan Chair in American History, was a fellow in the UW Teaching Academy, and a recipient of the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2010 he joined the faculty of Wheaton College, where he serves as professor and chair of the Department of History. A specialist in the history of the American Civil War, he is the author, most recently, ofLincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War, the 2007 recipient of the Fletcher Pratt Literary Award for best non-fiction work on the Civil War.

Luke Harlow (Ph.D., Rice University) is Assistant Professor of History at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He is co-editor, with Mark Noll, of Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2007). He has published scholarly articles on slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War era in Slavery and Abolition, Ohio Valley History, and the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society(forthcoming), and he serves as co-editor of the Journal of Southern Religion. He is completing a book manuscript, Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880, under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Laura Rominger Porter is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines links between evangelical church discipline, civil jurisprudence, and the politics of moral regulation in the nineteenth-century upper South, and how these interconnections related to theological debates over church jurisdiction and prerogative in the slaveholding states. Her dissertation, Church, State, and Moral Regulation in the Upper South, 1830-1880, demonstrates how evangelical churches and civil courts at first cooperated, and later diverged, on matters of moral regulation in the nineteenth-century upper South, and connects this differentiation of church and state functions to the subsequent political mobilization of white southern evangelicals for moral legislation.