For God and Globe

For God and Globe recovers the history of an important yet largely forgotten intellectual movement in interwar America. Michael G. Thompson explores the way radical-left and ecumenical Protestant internationalists articulated new understandings of the ethics of international relations between the 1920s and the 1940s.

Michael G. Thompson is Research Associate and Adjunct Lecturer at the United States Studies Centre of the University of Sydney.

For God and the Globe is a careful study of another yet-unexplored period of the role of religion in American life. It sets a high standard as a defining work for the interwar ecumenical movement.

Darren Dochuk, University of Notre Dame, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism:

Written with sophisticated grasp of happenings on multiple shores, from a purview that encompasses myriad intellectual trends and political sympathies, Michael G. Thompson's stellar book captures a fascinating juncture in time—the interwar period—when a cohort of illustrious thinkers articulated (and acted out) the virtues of internationalism, and rejected the trappings and egocentrism of the nation state for a new world order of inclusion and exchange. Considering our own discordant moment, when simplistic religious nationalisms predominate and notions of American exceptionalism still hold sway, Thompson’s is both a refreshing and convicting tale, one that enriches our understanding of a dynamic past, when community building was earnestly grappled with on a universal scale, and sheds critical light on the limiting ambitions of our present.

Douglas Rossinow, Metropolitan State University, author of Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America:

For God and Globe is a wonderfully fresh and vital work on Protestant internationalism, in all its political complexity, from the end of World War I to the end of World War II and the cusp of the Cold War. Michael G. Thompson reacquaints us with a lost world of religious internationalism that we really need to remember. Thompson's coverage of the major international ecumenical meetings in the 1920s and 1930s is superb and also truly important.