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"A rare book that combines searing passion with a subject that has affected all of our lives." - Chicago Tribune Novelist, cultural critic, and former priest James Carroll marries history with memoir as he maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life. "Fascinating, brave, and sometimes infuriating" (Time) , this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create "a deeply felt work" (San Francisco Chronicle) as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife and tragedy to reach a courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths.