Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

Charles Keith's Catholic Vietnam, A Church from Empire to Nation, published by the University of California Press in 2012, is a scholarly history tracing the Vietnamese Catholic Church's development from the French colonial period through the emergence of Vietnamese nationhood. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Keith's own archival research spanning both French colonial and Vietnamese sources. Its strength is following one religious community's institutional history continuously across a major political transition most histories treat as a hard break. Its limit is scope: it is a history of Vietnamese Catholicism specifically rather than a comprehensive religious history of Vietnam as a whole, so claims about other Vietnamese religious traditions in the same period need their own dedicated sources.