Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico . By Kathleen Holscher. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 274 pp. $55.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico . By Kathleen Holscher . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xii + 274 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesStudents of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, with its double-edged prohibition of any religious "establishment," on the one hand, and its guarantee of the "free exercise" of religion on the other, return again and again to two landmark cases from the 1940s. In the first, Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court permitted the expenditure of public funds to provide transportation for children in New Jersey who attended religious schools, not just for those who went to the public schools. Such funding did not represent government preference for any particular church. A year later, in McCollum v. Board of Education , the Court reversed direction, striking down an Illinois law that allowed representatives of different faiths to come into the public schools and provide religious instruction to those students whose parents voluntarily signed up for it. This program did indeed seem to favor some churches over others, and it therefore constituted an impermissible form of establishment. In both decisions, the Court made much of Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to the Baptist church of Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802, a letter that contained his reference to "a wall of separation between Church & State." It may be unwise to construct an enduring constitutional principle on an off-hand metaphor, but the idea of the "wall" has been firmly fixed in American legal and popular thinking ever since.The great virtue of Kathleen Holscher's Religious Lessons is that it looks at a case, more or less contemporary with Everson and McCollum , that never made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but that also wrestled with the meaning of the First Amendment. Zellers v. Huff was heard in a local court in New Mexico in the fall of 1948, and it turned on the peculiar arrangements that the state had made in organizing and staffing its schools. In the half-century after the territory's acquisition in the Mexican-American War, New Mexico had been singularly inept at organizing its public schools. Not until the 1890s was a system of tax-supported schools put into effect, and even then funding was spotty and hardly generous. Catholic sisters of several different orders had stepped into this breach. They opened their own church-related schools and, in some remote towns (which could not get teachers otherwise), they taught in the public schools as well. In places where the population was overwhelmingly Hispanic and Catholic, this caused little stir--kids were learning the three Rs, regardless of the constitutional niceties, and that seemed the most important thing--but where the population was more diverse, many began to wonder whether this arrangement was proper. One such place was the town of Dixon, north of Santa Fe near the Colorado border. …