When William the Conqueror had the Domesday Book compiled in 1086, this forerunner of the modern census reported at least 6,500 water-powered mills operating in England, or one for about every fifty f...
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...
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.
And therefore, according as any one is more anxious in demanding a reason, by so much will he be the firmer in preserving his faith.9
The absolute rulers of the states that arose from ‘Protestantism’ often did the equivalent of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Foreigners were simply excluded and driven out of the Scandinavian nation states.
Half of Americans belonged, and today about 70 per cent are affiliated with a local church.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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’,
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...
For one thing, relatively small forces were involved – at the Battle of Hastings (in 1066), which resulted in the Norman conquest of England, about 10,000 Normans overcame about 7,000 English (the pop...