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“Running away from God doesn’t work. I had tried.” —Roger Benimoff As he left for his second tour of duty as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Roger Benimoff noted in his journal: I am excited and I am scared. I am on fire for God...He is my hope, strength, and focus. But not long after returning to Iraq, the burdens of his job–the memorial services for soldiers killed in action, the therapy sessions after contact with the enemy, the perilous excursions “outside the wire” while under enemy fire–began to overwhelm him. Amid the dust, heat, and blood of Iraq, Benimoff felt the pillar of strength he’d always relied on to hold him up–his faith in God–begin to crumble. Unable to make sense of the senseless, Benimoff turned to his journal. What did it mean to believe in a God who would allow the utter horror and injustice of war? Did He want these brave young men and women to die? In his darkest moment, Benimoff wrote: Why am I so angry? I do not want anything to do with God. I am sick of religion. It is a crutch for the weak. Benimoff’s spiritual crisis heightened upon his return home to Fort Carson, Colorado. He withdrew emotionally from wife and sons, creating tensions that threatened to shatter the family. He was assigned to work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he counseled returning soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder–until he was diagnosed himself with PTSD. Finding himself in the role of patient rather than caregiver, connecting as an equal with his fellow sufferers, and revisiting scriptural readings that once again rang with meaning and truth, he began his most decisive battle: for the love of his family and for the chance to once again open his heart to the healing grace of God. Intimate and powerful, drawing on Benimoff’s and his wife’s journals, Faith Under Fire chronicles a spiritual struggle through war, loss, and the hard process of learning to believe again.
This poignant, sad, and sometimes funny story of a liberal-minded young man tells how he was raised in a race-unconscious home, only to find himself serving in a conservative right-wing military. Pierre van Blommestein shares his incredible true story in Carry on Padre. The book gives insight into Pierre’s liberal religious upbringing, his personal view of the challenges of Apartheid, his experiences as a chaplain during National Service, and the following seventeen years as a Reserve Forces Chaplain. The story is set over a period of twenty-five years, from Pierre leaving school in 1975, through the darkest years of the Apartheid era in the 1980s and 1990s. It includes the free elections in 1994 and reconstruction of the “New South Africa”, finally ending with his emigration from South Africa in 2000.
A survey and reassessment of the role of the army chaplain in its first 150 years. Few military or ecclesiastical figures are as controversial as the military chaplain, routinely attacked by pacifist and anticlerical commentators and too readily dismissed by religious and military historians. This highly revisionist study represents a complete reappraisal of the role of the British army chaplain and of the Royal Army Chaplains' Department in the first century and a half of its existence. Challenging old caricatures and stereotypes and drawing on a wealth of new archival material, it surveys the political, denominational and organisational development of the R.A.Ch.D., analyses the changing role and experience of the British army chaplain across the nineteenth century and the two World Wars, and addresses the wider significance of British army chaplaincy for Britain's military, religious and cultural history over the period c.1800-1950. MICHAEL SNAPE is Senior Lecturer in ModernHistory at the University of Birmingham. The volume has a Foreword by Richard Holmes.
Army chaplains have long played an integral part in America’s armed forces. In addition to conducting chapel activities on military installations and providing moral and spiritual support on the battlefield, they conduct memorial services for fallen soldiers, minister to survivors, offer counsel on everything from troubled marriages to military bureaucracy, and serve as families’ points of contact for wounded or deceased soldiers—all while risking the dangers of combat alongside their troops. In this thoughtful study, Anne C. Loveland examines the role of the army chaplain since World War II, revealing how the corps has evolved in the wake of cultural and religious upheaval in American society and momentous changes in U.S. strategic relations, warfare, and weaponry. From 1945 to the present, Loveland shows, army chaplains faced several crises that reshaped their roles over time. She chronicles the chaplains’ initiation of the Character Guidance program as a remedy for the soaring rate of venereal disease among soldiers in occupied Europe and Japan after World War II, as well as chaplains’ response to the challenge of increasing secularism and religious pluralism during the “culture wars” of the Vietnam Era.“Religious accommodation,” evangelism and proselytizing, public prayer, and “spiritual fitness”provoked heated controversy among chaplains as well as civilians in the ensuing decades. Then, early in the twenty-first century, chaplains themselves experienced two crisis situations: one the result of the Vietnam-era antichaplain critique, the other a consequence of increasing religious pluralism, secularization, and sectarianism within the Chaplain Corps, as well as in the army and the civilian religious community. By focusing on army chaplains’ evolving, sometimes conflict-ridden relations with military leaders and soldiers on the one hand and the civilian religious community on the other, Loveland reveals how religious trends over the past six decades have impacted the corps and, in turn, helped shape American military culture.
Born in 1922 in a poor section of Jersey City, New Jersey, to parents with only third grade educations, this is the life story of Gus Prinsell. In this autobiography, Gus starts by reflecting on his humble beginnings -- his earliest childhood memories are of poverty wrought by the Great Depression. His father was unemployed for a decade. Gus's parents never wavered in insisting that their children pursue an education. World War II started as he was entering his 20s, and he served his country in the US Navy. After becoming a "born again" Christian in the early 1940s and marrying Louise Bininger, he finished college and earned his medical doctor degree from Columbia University in 1952. From there, Gus went on to study surgery and tropical medicine. He then turned away from material gains and dedicated his life to medical missions in West Africa, where he moved with Louise and their four sons and opened the new Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital in 1959. In 1964, Gus returned to the States where he served as a family physician in Western New York until his retirement. Gus still lives in Houghton, New York, with his wife of over 70 years, Louise. At the ages of 94 and 91, Gus and Louise now have seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren. Gus takes us through his life’s journey in his own words. Not only does he tell the story of his own life, but he effectively weaves in the stories of many of his family and friends. His trust in the Lord through faith has led Gus through his life of achievement. When asked to describe himself in one phrase, he defines himself as “a Christian missionary physician and humanitarian.” His life of dedication to God and mankind is an example for us all.
The sinking of the Dorchester in the icy waters off Greenland shortly after midnight on February 3, 1942, was one of the worst sea disasters of World War II. It was also the occasion of an astounding feat of heroism—and faith. As water gushed through a hole made by a German torpedo, four chaplains—members of different faiths but linked by bonds of friendship and devotion—moved quietly among the men onboard. Preaching bravery, the chaplains distributed life jackets, including their own. In the end, these four men went down with the ship, their arms linked in spiritual solidarity, their voices raised in prayer. In this spellbinding narrative, award-winning author and journalist Dan Kurzman tells the story of these heroes and the faith—in God and in country—that they shared. They were about as different as four American clergymen could be. George Lansing Fox (Methodist), wounded and decorated in World War I, loved his family and his Vermont congregation—yet he re-enlisted as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor. Rabbi Alex Goode was an athlete, an intellectual, and an adoring new father—yet he too knew, the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, that he would serve. Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed), the son a famous radio evangelist, left for war begging his father to pray that he would never be a coward. Father John Washington (Catholic), a scrappy Irish street fighter, had dedicated himself to the church after a childhood brush with death. Chance brought the chaplains together at a Massachusetts training camp, but each was convinced that God had a reason for placing them together aboard the Dorchester. Drawing on extensive interviews with the chaplains’ families and the crews of both the Dorchester and the German submarine that fired the fatal torpedo, Kurzman re-creates the intimate circumstances and great historic events that culminated in that terrible night. The final hours unfold with the electrifying clarity of nightmare—the chaplains taking charge of the dwindling supply of life jackets, the panic of the crew, the overcrowded lifeboats, the prayers that ring out over the chaos, and the tight circle that the four chaplains form as the inevitable draws near. In No Greater Glory, Dan Kurzman tells how four extraordinary men left their mark on a single night of war—and forever changed the lives of those they saved. Riveting and inspiring, this is a true story of heroism, of goodness in the face of disaster, and of faith that transfigures even the horror of war.
After the Great War some texts by British Army veterans portrayed the Anglican chaplains who had served with them in an extremely negative light. This book examines the realities of Anglican chaplains' wartime experiences and presents a compelling picture of what it meant to be a clergyman-in-uniform in the most devastating war in modern history.