So Bede’s story is celebrating his people’s association with this far away place, Rome, which was the centre of the Roman Empire. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human. Generations of users attest to its status as the best one-volume Bible reference tool for any home, library, or classroom. It is a Christianity which is, in many ways, closer to the Christianities of the generations after Jesus Christ.

His other broadcasting work includes How God Made the English (2012), Henry VIII’s Fixer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell (2012) and Sex and the Church (2015). Let’s go on to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and how that fits in with the history of Christianity. Byzantium is Judith Herrin’s masterful and often surprising history of a 1,000-year empire, in a Folio Society edition sumptuously illustrated with imperial treasures, plus a new introduction by the author. It’s 2000 years of human history, or, as I put it in a recent book, really 3000 years, because you can’t really separate out the religion’s Jewish and Greek heritage. Christianity did not come out too well in its encounters with these totalitarian ideologies, and I don’t think Europeans have forgotten that.

From the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne - the "dark ages" - learning, scholarship, and culture disappeared from the European continent.

More important, he understood that faith and reason should not be considered opposites, and that debating fundamental concepts is essential to the moral and spiritual health of a religious organization. If there was one book I’d give to people in my church who were interested in engaging with art , this would be it. This classic biography was first published thirty years ago and has since established itself as the standard account of Saint Augustine's life and teaching.Three hundred years ago, an uneducated lay cook in a French monastery discovered how to enjoy a profound awareness of God moment by moment, even in the midst of busyness and distraction. His book is very thorough, covering the topic from ancient polytheistic Mediterranean mythology up through the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostics, and early Christianity. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.

One thing that evangelical Christianity offered them was to make a choice: to choose to turn to Jesus. The story begins in the aftermath of Confederation, when the prospects of building a Christian nation persuaded a group of Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian leaders to set aside denominational differences and focus instead on shared beliefs. He delves deep into its ancestry as it emerges from the Ancient Greek and Hebrew cultures, assumes divergent forms in the East and West, and co-exists with the rising faith of Islam. When I watched the Ridley Scott film Gladiator for the first time, I knew then my heart belonged in Ancient Rome.Transported two thousand years into the past, readers are introduced to Antipas, a Roman civic leader who has encountered the writings of the biblical author Luke. The representatives of the churches in the East either didn’t go to that conference, or they went and said, ‘Well, we don’t agree with you and we’re not going to sign this agreement.

S. Lewis ofrece una inigualable oportunidad al creyente y al no creyente para escuchar un argumento fuerte y racional para la fe.The popular and distinguished Oxford historian, Diarmaid MacCulloch, recommends books that will help you make a start. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero,. Syria: The Desert and The Sown is a masterpiece of travel writing by Gertrude Bell, a pioneering Victorian explorer of Arabia, now available in a stunning Folio edition featuring her original photography. In terms of his specific argument – that Christianity helped cause the collapse of the Roman Empire by, amongst other things, preaching ‘patience and pusillanimity’ – has that been borne out by modern scholarship? As it turns out, the first person to be described as filled by the Spirit in the Bible was an artist.