The Victory of Reason - How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

In this new edition of his classic work, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. With the magisterial sweep of Toynbee, to whom he is often compared, Dawson tells here the tale of medieval Christendom. From the brave travels of sixth-century Irish monks to the grand synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Dawson brilliantly shows how vast spiritual movements arose from tiny origins and changed the face of medieval Europe from one century to the next. The legacy of those years of ferment remains with us in the great cathedrals, Gregorian chant, and the works of Giotto and Dante. Even more, though, for Dawson these centuries charged the soul of the West with a spiritual concern -- a concern that he insists "can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself."

How the mystery of the Bible's greatest story shaped geology: a MacArthur Fellow presents a surprising perspective on Noah's Flood.

More than 40 percent of the people on earth today are Christians, and their number is growing more rapidly than that of any other major faith. In The Triumph of Christianity, acclaimed religious and social historian Rodney Stark explains how an obscure Jewish sect became the largest, most thriving religion in the world.

In Stark's groundbreaking book The Rise of Christianity, he examined the early success of Christianity and how it conquered Rome. Now, in this much-anticipated volume, Stark tells a far more extensive story, beginning with the religious and social situation prior to the birth of Jesus and continuing to the present.

As it moves through six historical eras, The Triumph of Christianity gets right to Christianity's most pivotal and controversial moments—often turning them on their heads:

Christmas Eve surveys the religious situation within which Christianity began.

Christianizing the Empire looks at Jesus's life and the formative days of the movement he inspired, explaining why Christianity was a reprieve from the miseries of daily life for so many.

Consolidating Christian Europe argues that Constantine's conversion did the church a great deal of harm, examines the gradual demise of paganism, and clarifies the motives behind the Crusades.

Medieval Currents sheds new light on the misleadingly named "Dark Ages" and the essential role that faith played in the scientific revolution.

Christianity Divided examines two Roman Catholic "Churches"—the Church of Piety and the Church of Power—as they respond to the challenges of heresy, Luther's Reformation, and the Spanish Inquisition.

New Worlds and Christian Growth considers the development of religious pluralism in the United States and the continuing vigor of Christianity worldwide, disproving the popular notion that religion must disappear to make room for modernity.

With his signature knack for making the boldest and most original scholarship accessible to all readers, Stark presents the real story behind the tragedies and triumphs that have shaped the trajectory of the Christian faith and, indeed, much of global history. For scholars and armchair historians alike, this is a brisk and thought-provoking journey through events we think we know—and need to reconsider.

Liberal attacks on the doctrine of the divinity of Christ have led evangelicals to rightly affirm the centrality of Jesus’s divine nature for his person and work. At times, however, this defense of orthodoxy has led some to neglect Christ’s full humanity. To counteract this oversight, theologian Bruce Ware takes readers back to the biblical text, where we meet a profoundly human Jesus who struggled with many of the same difficulties and limitations we face today. Like us, he grew in faith and wisdom, tested by every temptation common to man. And like us, he too received power for godliness through the Holy Spirit, and thus serves not only as the divine Lord to be worshiped, but also the supreme Human to be followed.

In the 1993 edition, I considered black madonnas a metaphor for a memory of the time when the earth was belived to be the body of woman and all creatures were equal, a memory transmitted in vernacular traditions of earth-bounded cultures, historically expressed in cultural and poltical resistance, and glimpsed today in movements aiming for transformation.

Sine then my understanding of black madonnas has been deepened by genetics finding that the orgin of modern humans is Africa, that migrations from Africa carried a primordial belief in a dar woman divinity to all continents. Black madonnas and other dark women of the world suggest a metaphor for healing millennial divisions of gender and race and concerted movements for justice.