How and why did the early church grow in the first four hundred years despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution? In this unique historical study, veteran scholar Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of study as he tells the amazing story of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the church grew because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. They wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, yet the church grew--not by specific strategies but by patient ferment.

Written at a time of very lax standards in the parish ministry, this short, classic text by George Herbert exudes the wisdom, humility, and love for the priestly life for which the poet became renowned in his short life.

Here is Friedrich Nietzsche's great masterpiece The Anti-Christ, wherein Nietzsche attacks Christianity as a blight on humanity. This classic is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Nietzsche and his place within the history of philosophy. "We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts-the strong man as the typical reprobate, the 'outcast among men.' Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity " -Friedrich Nietzsche

Uniquely in the kingdoms of western Christendom, the Scottish bishops obtained authority, in 1225, to hold inter-diocesan meetings without a supervisory archbishop, and continued to meet in this way for nearly 250 years. Donald Watt provides an authoritative study of these church councils from the Latin and English records based on original sources.In addition to creating an original work of considerable historical interest, Professor Watt brings discussion of the councils and their significance into the broader context of Scotland's political, legal, ecclesiastical and social situation over a long period.An important contribution to Scottish church history and to its influence on contemporary affairs.

The 1960s were a time of explosive religious change. In the Christian churches, it was a time of innovation, from the "new theology" and "new morality" of Bishop Robinson to the evangelicalism of the Charismatic Movement, and of charismatic leaders such as Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King. But it was also a time of rapid social and cultural change when Christianity faced challenges from Eastern religions, from Marxism and feminism, and above all from new "affluent" lifestyles. Hugh McLeod tells in detail, using oral history, how these movements and conflicts were experienced in England, but because the Sixties were an international phenomenon, he looks at other countries as well, especially the U.S. and France. McLeod explains what happened to religion in the 1960s, why it happened, and how the events of that decade shaped the rest of the 20th century.