Christendom by Peter Heather
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A sweeping history of how Christianity conquered the world.
Read MoreBody of Proof by Jeremiah Johnston
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A slim new book that attempts to lay out proofs for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Read MoreRefugia Faith by Debra Rienstra
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A call for Christians to take on the work of saving the world.
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Cross Examined by John W. Campbell
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Everything you’ve always wondered about Christianity but were for 1800 years forbidden on pain of death to ask.
Read MoreDominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
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Holland traces the insatiable growth and development of Christianity through all its major stages and locations.
Read MoreThe Twentysomething Soul by Tim Clydesdale & Kathleen Garces-Foley
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A very readable guide surveying the inner faith-lives of a generation most Americans find baffling at best.
Read MoreNebuchadnezzar's Dream by Jay Rubenstein
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This book deals with the Crusades in general and the First Crusade in specific, and is at least as much about myth as history.
Read MoreChristianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History by Brian Stanley
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Stanley's arguments are based on wide-ranging research, and his prose is clear.
Read MoreChristian: The Politics of a Word in America by Matthew Bowman
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This book delves into the ongoing struggle over the word “Christian” and its centrality to American politics.
Read MoreJames Wood and The Fall of Man
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At one point in James Wood’s novel The Book Against God, the spiritually tortured narrator Thomas Bunting is transported to a painful recollection of adolescence. Thomas is the son of a kind and intelligent Anglican priest. His childhood was filled with love and attention. Then one day when he was 14, he says, he walked into his school’s assembly hall and, as though stepping through some kind of portal, entered into a state of self-consciousness:
Read MoreAbsent Friends: It wasn't what he wanted
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As Charles Homer Haskins pointed out in his humbly durable masterpiece The Renaissance of the 12th Century, the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all. Fiercely cold most of the time (due to a bout of climate change), but not dark in the sense of shuttered. Beknighted, but not benighted.
The great scholar John Addington Symonds (whose absence from bookstore shelves bloody well qualifies him for honoring here in Absent Friends, somewhere down the line) put it very prettily when he observed that any age without Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael must necessarily seem dark. The ostentatious showboating of the Italian Renaissance is the problem in a nutshell when it comes to thinking about the innocent ages that come before.
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