This ‘shocking realism’52 has often surprised and upset Augustine’s readers. But, given the immense authority of the writer, this view shaped Christian political sensibilities ever after: Christian wr...
This is not to say that the Muslims were more brutal or less tolerant than were Christians or Jews, for it was a brutal and intolerant age. It is to say that efforts to portray Muslims as enlightened...
There is an additional and compelling question that probably also will go unaddressed: what is a Protestant? In this brief Introduction I will demonstrate that the category ‘Protestant’ includes so mu...
The Mormon definition of life makes the earthly sojourn basically an educative process. Knowledge is necessary to mastery, and the way to deification is through mastery, for not only does education ai...
The European Middle Ages collected innovations from all over the world, especially from China, and built them into a new unity which formed the basis of our modern civilization.
Recalling his days as a student in Paris from about 1205 to 1210, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry wrote: Simple fornication was held to be no sin. Everywhere, publicly, close to their brothels, prostitutes...
No doubt Western modernity has its limitations and discontents. Still, it is far better than the known alternatives—not only, or even primarily, because of its advanced technology but because of its f...
Lujo Brentano (1844–1931), who correctly noted that industrial capitalism originated in southern Europe long before the German Reformation and was taken north mainly by Catholic banking firms.
It is not the poor who are joining – persons of all income levels are equally likely to join. Men are almost as likely as women to become Protestants and the unmarried are not different from the marri...
In fact, when the Egyptians would not export papyrus, parchment (made from treated animal skins) was invented in Pergamum. The word parchment derives from the Latin Pergamena charta, or paper of Perga...
Europe’s elites, ‘the Reformation replaced loyalty to Christendom with loyalty to nation, and it also replaced Christian identity with national identity’.
By the late twelfth century Europe was so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.
But Christendom was not merely a community of warriors or even a community of the nobility. It was a civilization! Unfortunately, for generations everyone was taught that the era beginning with the fa...
Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state...
The Reformations resulted in state churches that were even more repressive of individuals than the Catholic Church ever attempted to be. The Reformations did not contribute anything to religious freed...
Thus, by no later than the thirteenth century, the leading Christian theologians had fully debated the primary aspects of emerging capitalism – profits, property rights, credit, lending and the like....
This partly reflects the Balkanization of history – that scholars attend only to their special time and place. But, for the most part, it reflects that far too many scholars rely on the received wisdo...
The Greeks were the first people in the world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games; athletic contests of every description … contests in musi...
No wonder that progress was so slow within the ancient empires. Anything of value—land, crops, livestock, buildings, even children—could be arbitrarily seized, and as the Chinese iron magnates learned...
More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned Western Civilization courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.