That new technologies and techniques would be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships--although both were condemned...
The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the culti...
Nevertheless, the more odious restrictions – such as being confined at night to ghettos, or even being expelled from a nation – were placed upon them by the state, not the Roman Catholic Church.
What is a peasant society? It can be defined many ways, such as when most people live in rural areas and farm for a living. But that’s not what Marx, Weber and the others had in mind. For them, peasan...
This chapter does not mourn the collapse of Christendom, although it is hard not to be nostalgic for its many virtues, especially for the international character of the elite who ruled both its politi...
It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers reached China in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artiller...
Plutarch (AD 46–120) estimated that Julius Caesar’s campaign in Gaul yielded at least a million slaves.
When the Greeks were free they created a civilization advanced beyond anything else in the world. When Rome imposed its imperial rule all across the West, progress ceased for a millennium. The fall of...
Because God is a rational being and the universe is his personal creation, it necessarily has a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This is the key to many inte...
But following these Stone Age discoveries, progress was slow. It is estimated that in terms of the standard of living, things were pretty much the same for the next seven thousand years.1 People ate a...
Humans will tend to adopt and retain those elements of culture that appear to produce better results, while those that appear to be less rewarding will tend to be discarded.
The implications of these fertility differences have been fully explored by Eric Kaufmann of the University of London in his book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010). Kaufmann noted that be...
Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these princi...
Nevertheless, this too is a myth. The Catholic Church actually thrives on Protestant competition and is far more successful and effective when forced to confront it.
Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, 30 Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one,...
There is at least as much, and probably much more, variation on these matters among the Protestants of various types included in these merged ‘Protestant’ groups, than between the ‘average’ Protestant...
Rather than a great tragedy, the fall of Rome was the single most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization.
That the Catholic Church finally thrives in Latin America could be considered as partly a gift from Martin Luther.
Even more important, Islam holds that the universe is inherently irrational—that there is no cause and effect—because everything happens as the direct result of Allah’s will at that particular time. A...
Tawney added an additional twist by suggesting that ‘nascent capitalism . . . [shaped] Calvinism’s attitude to enterprise and the accumulation of wealth, not vice versa’.
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