The Triumph Of Christianity

Download or read book The Triumph of Christianity written by Bart D. Ehrman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did Christianity become the dominant religion in the West? In the early first century, a small group of peasants from the backwaters of the Roman Empire proclaimed that an executed enemy of the state was God’s messiah. Less than four hundred years later it had become the official religion of Rome with some thirty million followers. It could so easily have been a forgotten sect of Judaism. Through meticulous research, Bart Ehrman, an expert on Christian history, texts and traditions, explores the way we think about one of the most important cultural transformations the world has ever seen, one that has shaped the art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics and economics of modern Western civilisation.

Download or read book The Triumph of Christianity written by Rodney Stark and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religious historian and author of God’s Battalions delivers an accessible and illuminating account of Christianity’s rise in the West. In The Triumph of Christianity, celebrated sociologist and religious historian Rodney Stark traces the extraordinary rise of Christianity through its most pivotal and controversial moments to offer fresh perspective on the history of the world’s largest religion. Stark gathers and distills decades of authoritative research into a concise and highly readable volume that explores Christianity’s most crucial episodes. Stark begins with an overview of the pre-Christian religious landscape before examining how Christianity spread among the Roman Empire’s elite—especially women—and then expanded throughout Europe. Eschewing dense chronologies, Stark delivers a fascinating and often surprising narrative, bringing readers right to the heart of Christian history’s most vital controversies and enduring lessons.

Download or read book A World Full of Gods written by Keith Hopkins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-07-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Evokes the sights and sounds of the ancient world with daring and imagination… An intellectual tour-de-force that challenges us to see the history of Christianity through the eyes of those who actually lived it.”—Los Angeles Times In this provocative, irresistibly entertaining book, Keith Hopkins takes readers back in time to explore the roots of Christianity in ancient Rome. Combining exacting scholarship with dazzling invention, Hopkins challenges our perceptions about religion, the historical Jesus, and the way history is written. He puts us in touch with what he calls "empathetic wonder"—imagining what Romans, pagans, Jews, and Christians thought, felt, experienced, and believed-by employing a series of engaging literary devices. These include a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls; the first-person testimony of a pair of time-travelers to Pompeii; a meditation on Jesus' apocryphal twin brother; and an unusual letter on God, demons, and angels.

Download or read book A New History of Early Christianity written by Charles Freeman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tracing the astonishing transformation that the early Christian church underwent - from sporadic niches of Christian communities surviving in the wake of a horrific crucifixion to sanctioned alliance with the state - Charles Freeman shows how freedom of thought was curtailed by the development of the concept of faith. The imposition of 'correct belief' and an institutional framework that enforced orthodoxy were both consolidating and stifling. Uncovering the church's relationships with Judaism, Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, Freeman offers dramatic new accounts of Paul, the resurrection, and the church fathers and emperors."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Christianity and the Triumph of Humor written by Bernard Schweizer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of religious comedy and leverages that history to justify today’s uses of religious humor in all of its manifestations, including irreverent jokes. It argues that regulating humor is futile and counterproductive, illustrating this point with a host of comedic examples. Humor is a powerful rhetorical tool for those who advocate and for those who satirize religious ideals. The book presents a compelling argument about the centrality of humor to the story of Western Christianity’s cultural and artistic development since the Middle Ages, taking a multi-disciplinary approach that combines literary criticism, religious studies, philosophy, theology, and social science. After laying out the conceptual framework in Part 1, Part 2 analyzes key works of religious comedy across the ages from Dante to the present, and it samples the breadth of contemporary religious humor from Brad Stine to Robin Williams, and from Monty Python to South Park. Using critical, historical, and conceptual lenses, the book exposes and overturns past attempts by church authorities, scholars, and commentators to limit and control laughter based on religious, ideological, or moral criteria. This is a unique look into the role of humor and comedy around religion. It will, therefore, appeal to readers interested in multiple fields of inquiry, including religious studies, humor studies, the history of ideas, and comparative literature.

Download or read book The Triumph of Faith written by Rodney Stark and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "God is not dead." —Wall Street Journal Believe it or not, the world is more religious than ever before. Everyone seems to take it for granted that the world is getting more secular—that faith is doomed by modernity. Scientists, secularists, and atheists applaud the change; religious believers lament it. But here's the thing: they're all wrong—and the bestselling author and influential scholar of religion Rodney Stark has the numbers to prove it.The Triumph of Faith explodes the myth that people around the world are abandoning religion. Stark marshals an unprecedented body of data—surveys of more than a million people in 163 nations—to paint the full picture that both scholars and popular commentators have missed. And he explains why the astonishing growth of religion is happening and what it means for our future. Stark's bracing book is full of insights that defy the conventional wisdom. With vigorous prose he reveals: •Why claims about Millennials' lack of religion are overblown and historically ignorant •Why Islam is NOT overtaking Christianity •How 4 out of 5 people worldwide now belong to an organized religion •How 50 percent have attended a worship service in the past week •Why much-ballyhooed studies from the Pew Research Center and others get the religious landscape wrong •Why atheists remain few, anywhere—despite all the talk of the "New Atheism" As Stark shows, secularists have been predicting the imminent demise of religion for centuries. It is their unshakable faith in secularization that may be the most "irrational" of all beliefs. As the author of How the West Won, The Victory of Reason, and many other bestselling works, Rodney Stark has a richly deserved reputation for writing page-turning, myth-busting books. He is also a groundbreaking scholar who has so reshaped the social scientific study of religion that his work has become the basis of a "new paradigm." Stark puts all those talents on full display in The Triumph of Faith.This book will change how you see both religion and the forces of secularization.

Download or read book Tempted and Tried written by Russell Moore and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2011-03-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although temptation is a common and well-acknowledged part of the human experience, few realize the truth behind temptation and fewer still know how to defeat it. Tempted and Tried will not reassure Christians by claiming that temptation is less powerful or less prevalent than it is; instead, it will prepare believers for battle by telling the truth about the cosmic war that is raging. Moore shows that the temptation of every Christian is part of a broader conspiracy against God, a conspiracy that confronts everyone who shares the flesh of Jesus through human birth and especially confronts those who share the Spirit of Christ through the new birth of redemption. Moore walks readers through the Devil's ancient strategies for temptation revealed in Jesus' wilderness testing. Moore considers how those strategies might appear in a contemporary context and points readers to a way of escape. Tempted and Tried will remind Christians that temptation must be understood in terms of warfare, encouraging them with the truth that victory has already been secured through the triumph of Christ.