The great strength of the book is that it covers, in sufficient but not oppressive detail, huge areas of Christian history which are dealt with cursorily in traditional accounts of the subject. In this stunningly intelligent book, Karen Armstrong, one of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present.

Book 1 in the 3-book historical Christian fiction series by the New York Times bestselling author of Redeeming Love and The Masterpiece. And it really destroyed the credibility of the Portuguese, the last people in Europe really to defend their colonial empire.

Xi Lian, a professor of world Christianity at the Duke Divinity School, explains the political and cultural reasons for this and focuses on the Chinese Christians at the vanguard of the indigenous movement—including my great-uncle Watchman Nee. I’ll read you a little bit: ‘The Britons [in other words the people who aren’t Angli] for the most part have a national hatred for the Angli and uphold their own bad customs against the true Easter of the Catholic Church. He was looking around for a pew, and the church was crowded, but he saw one empty pew at the front, and he thought, ‘Oh, I’ll sit there – I’m a gentleman, I’m important, and it looks an important seat. The first book in the beloved Mark of the Lion series, A Voice in the Wind brings readers back to the first century and introduces them to a character they will never forget―Hadassah. So was writing about Christianity in the Roman Empire just an excuse to be rude about the contemporary Church?

It’s easy for us 21st-century liberals to feel it was dreadfully repressive, but if society is constantly on the edge of violence, as that society was, I think we’d feel rather differently about the community disapproving of people stepping out of line. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor.D. 381, Theodosius, emperor of the eastern Roman empire, issued a decree in which all his subjects were required to subscribe to a belief in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Christianity will teach modern readers things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread. Christianity did not come out too well in its encounters with these totalitarian ideologies, and I don’t think Europeans have forgotten that. He knows the use of irony, but doesn't let it become the nervous tic it sometimes is in historians who bring no theological agenda to their work. At one time Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a story to tell.

This is history on an epic scale, and like all the great epics, it begins in a distant time of confusion and struggle long before the birth of the protagonist. I like seeing books for a dime or a quarter, and in years past, I’d used such deals to build up my large, eclectic library.