Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic

Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic examines how Catholics in the early nineteenth-century Ohio Valley – despite the evangelical success of the Protestant faith during the Second Great Awakening – expanded their church, strengthened their connections to Rome, and sought fellowship with their non-Catholic neighbors. Using extensive correspondence, reports, diaries, court documents, apologetical works, and other records of Catholic clergy, John R. Dichtl shows how Catholic leadership successfully pursued strategies of growth in frontier regions while continually weighing major decisions against established Protestant doctrine. Frontiers of Faith helps restore Catholicism to the story of religious development in the Early Republic and emphasizes the importance of clerical and lay efforts to make sacred the landscape of the New West.