From the author of the New York Times best-selling Constantine's Sword comes a richly layered history, fueled by powerful insight, of the ancient city at the epicenter of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim experience.   "A masterful look at the paradoxical city on a hill...a meditation unlike any book published this season, indeed a meditation for all seasons." --Boston Globe To the standard set by Constantine's Sword, Jerusalem, Jerusalem is again a "rare book that combines searing passion . . . with a subject that has affected all our lives" --Chicago Tribune  'Another winner from a skillful writer and thinker of the first rank." --Kirkus Reviews James Carroll's urgent, masterly Jerusalem, Jerusalem uncovers the ways in which the ancient city became, unlike any other in the world-- reaching deep into our contemporary lives-- an incendiary fantasy of a city. In Carroll's provocative reading of the deep past, the Bible's brutality responded to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Centuries later, the mounting European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem sparked both anti-Semitism and racist colonial contempt. The holy wars of the Knights Templar burned apocalyptic mayhem into the Western mind. Carroll's brilliant and original leap is to show how, as Christopher Columbus carried his own Jerusalemcentric worldview to the West, America too was powerfully shaped by the dream of the City on a Hill-- from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan. The nuclear brinksmanship of the 1973 Yom Kippur War helps prove his point: religion and violence fuel each other, with Jerusalem the ground zero of the heat. James Carroll was raised in Washington, D.C., and ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1969. He served as a chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974, then left the priesthood to become a writer. A distinguished scholar- in-residence at Suffolk University, he is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a regular contributor to the Daily Beast. His critically admired books include Practicing Catholic, the National Book Award-winning An American Requiem, House of War, which won the first PEN/Galbraith Award, and the New York Times bestseller Constantine's Sword, now an acclaimed documentary. This event is brought to you by We the People, a film and lecture series made up of the Exeter Congregational Church, First Unitarian Universalist Society of Exeter, Christ Church, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Water Street Bookstore. It is free and open to the public.