By the seventh century, Christianity probably was far stronger and more sophisticated in North Africa and Asia than in Europe.
Even if they hated going to church and knew very little of Christianity, Europeans in the era of the Reformations were not irreligious. But, as Gerald Strauss put it, they ‘practiced their own brand o...
In addition, since they were committed to reasoning about God, the Jews were quick to embrace the Greek concern for valid reasoning. What emerged was an image of God as not only eternal and immutable...
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...
In his magisterial The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch was quite correct that ‘Luther’s writing of 1543 is a blueprint for the Nazi’s Kristallnacht of 1938’,
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
As for doctrine, Luther asserted the absolute authority of Holy Scripture and that each human must discover the meaning of scripture and establish his or her own, personal relationship with God.
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...
By the late twelfth century Europe was so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.
Europe’s elites, ‘the Reformation replaced loyalty to Christendom with loyalty to nation, and it also replaced Christian identity with national identity’.
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...
Merton was given an unusual amount of space in the American Journal of Sociology to argue on behalf of his thesis that to reject it on the basis of the evidence against it would be to commit what he c...
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...
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