Washington National Cathedral

James Carroll, award winning author and columnist, makes an impassioned case that religious belief can move to new levels of maturity through historical study and critical thinking.

Carroll hosted a screening and discussion of the film, James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, a new documentary film by Oren Jacoby, which explores the roots of religiously inspired contempt and violence. In his book of the same title, Carroll traces the development of the racial anti-Semitism of the Holocaust rising from early Christian anti-Judaism.

The film also shows how faith-inspired prejudice and violence have pervaded Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations since 1948, and even more so since 2001. It documents fundamentalist Christian evangelizing in the American military and its influence on American foreign policy. Watch this compelling personal narrative and witness the hope that arises when we are willing to expose the dark areas of our past to search for a better future.

About Jim Carroll

James Carroll is a novelist, essayist, and non-fiction writer whose bestselling 2001 book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews explores the history of anti-Semitism in the West. A former Roman Catholic priest, he has written about the Catholic sex abuse crisis and, most recently, about the American military in the award-winning House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. He is a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe and a regular participant in on-going Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogues at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.