“Damn the United States!  I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” So said the enraged antihero of  “A Man without a Country,”  a short story published in The Atlantic in December, 1863. The United states was still in the middle of a war that would determine whether or not the nation would survive as one or as a nation divided; a war fought largely because of ideas about what it meant to be a nation, what it meant to be human and what it meant to be a people of faith. The protagonist, a young man named Phillip Nolan, had been tried for and convicted of treason when he rashly uttered the words that sealed his fate.  Nolan got his wish.  He was exiled on a series of ships, an exile that never ended.  No one ever spoke to him again of his country. It was only as Nolan lay dying that he heard about the America he’d repudiated some fifty-five years before his demise. At the end Nolan realizes he loves his...(Read Full Article)