www.bookfish.co.za

The Great and Holy War: How World War I became a religious crusade by Philip Jenkins offers the first look at how religion created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western civilisation, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the twentieth century. The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who presented the conflict as a holy war. The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century, giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and communism.