Write to get the truth out there (2)

In citing yet another book I have on the go, you will wonder if I do nothing but read. (No I don't, but sometimes it so happens I've discovered more than one great book and want t0 get through them all before returning them to the library. Okay?)

This other book is Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War by Harry S. Stout. Having an interest in the Civil War, I went looking for this book when I noticed Christianity Today had selected it one year as a "Book of the Year." What Stout does in Upon the Altar, in my opinion, is to look at the Civil War neither from a "conservative" nor "liberal" point of view. Instead, he looks at it from the perspective of just war theory as set forth by Christian thinkers from St. Augustine onward.

For those of us who luxuriated in the strains of Ashoeken Farewell while watching Ken Burn's magnificent Civil War series on PBS, it is a let down. We like our heroes and our sanitized versions of the past. But in this book, Abe Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and Robert E. Lee often come across as morally deficient--even as they in other ways were good men. Not unlike the way the Bible depicts its heroes, come to think of it. Stout is strictly fair, citing fact upon fact, and the result is a look at the past as it was, not as we wish it had been. We should look at the past in such a way, says Stout, not in order to pass judgment on the people who lived back then. Instead it is so that we can go forward living the right way ourselves.

Stout in his writing (and a fine writer he is) in other words, is "getting the truth out there." A worthy goal for any of us.