English Church History

From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress.

There is a church...not the one that man is building...but the one that Jesus himself has been constructing in the hearts and lives of believers throughout the ages.

In which the author gives a concise account of, together with sundry caustic animadversions on, the very fantastic theology of the sect. This treatise is professedly taken from the writings of Justin, Miltiades, Irenæus, and Proculus.

The Catholic Church has a history that spans over 2,000 years, and it began with none other than Jesus Christ himself. At least, that is what modern popes believe. But at first, there was just one church, and there was no division between Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and other branches of Christianity. Christians all over the known world were united, and together, they made their spirituality bloom. Their religion took over the lives of villagers, nobles, kings, queens, and even newly arrived pagan armies that came to conquer Europe.

Many Christians today long to become reacquainted with their ancient ancestors in the faith. They see a deeper worship and devotion in the prayers and hymns of the early church. And they believe that the writings of the early church can shed new light on their understanding of Scripture. But where and how do we begin? Our first encounter with the writings of the church fathers may seem like visiting a far country where the language, assumptions, concerns, and conclusions are completely unfamiliar to us. Author Christopher Hall helps us through this cultural confusion.

The first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it.

David Headley, the American Pakistani also known as Daood Gilani, lived a double life. One day he would stroll through Central Park in his tailored Armani suit as a true New Yorker, and the next he would browse in the bazaar in Lahore wearing traditional Pakistani clothes. One day he would drink champagne at the most extravagant clubs; on another he would prostrate himself in prayer in remote Pakistan and pledge fidelity to Allah.

A number of efforts were made in the US during the 19th century to create a single textbook of Roman Catholic Christian doctrine that might be used by all American Catholics. In 1885, a catechism was put together by the Order of the Third Council of Baltimore.

Christians have proclaimed the good news about Jesus for centuries. But the good news isn't sounding so good these days, at least to some. More and more surveys show that people view Christians as bearers of bad news, judgment, and intolerance. In Vanishing Grace, best-selling author Philip Yancey acknowledges the problem and then explores how we can respond with both grace and truth. He offers a discerning look at what contributes to a hostility toward Christians, and identifies three groups - pilgrims, artists, and activists - who can show us a different way.

The prophets of old were not easy to listen to because they did not flatter. They did not cajole. They spoke hard words that often chafed and unsettled their listeners. Like the Old Testament prophets, and more recent prophetic voices like Frederick Douglass, Dr. Eric Mason calls the evangelical church to a much-needed reckoning.

I have done my own research, including traveling to and touring the modern locations of each of these seven churches.

After decades of opposition, the Latter-day Saints have dedicated the Salt Lake Temple, a mighty symbol of their industry and faith. Now, with a new century on the horizon, the Saints are optimistic about the future and ready to spread the Savior's message of peace across the globe. Boldly, Nobly, and Independent is the third book in Saints, a new, four-volume narrative history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Fast-paced and meticulously researched, Saints recounts true stories of Latter-day Saints across the globe.

Thanks to Dan Brown's best-selling novel turned blockbuster mega-hit, The Da Vinci Code, in which audiences were introduced to Silas, the villainous, self-whipping monk, corporal mortification is now a term most often associated with Opus Dei. A creepy, deranged, and blood-thirsty albino monk, Silas is most remembered for viciously whipping himself with a nail-embedded cilice. For added suspense, various falsehoods of the real-life order have been propagated by the literary masterpiece; in fact, the character of Silas contains one of the foremost bloopers, as there were never any monks in the order.

Cultural Christians in the Early Church, which aims to be both historical and practical, argues that cultural Christians were the rule, rather than the exception, in the early church. Using different categories of sins as its organizing principle, the book considers the challenge of culture to the earliest converts to Christianity, as they struggled to live on mission in the Greco-Roman cultural milieu of the Roman Empire.

Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious examination. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief, tragic life of a lost Mormon city, demonstrating that the Mormons are essential to understanding American history writ large. Using newly accessible sources, Park re-creates the Mormons' 1839 flight from Missouri to Illinois.

Maybe you’ve wondered just what the Church has to offer. Or maybe you’ve been tempted to give up on it as you realize its weaknesses. The Compact History of the Catholic Church sweeps through the centuries offering a clear-eyed view of the Church’s development and contributions to world history.

While Christians generally acknowledge that the Bible is God's Word, many of us lack robust confidence in the reality of its trustworthiness. We may not be sure if we really believe what we read. But the more we understand how Scripture came to be, the more we discover its power and truth. Historian Susan Lim unpacks how the history of the Bible bolsters our faith and anchors us through the changing tides of time. The story of Scripture, while messy and complicated at times, is also the story of how God shepherded his people throughout the centuries in and through these writings.

No nation, institution, empire, or dynasty has helped shape the world more than the Catholic Church. Armies have marched upon one another. Kings have risen and fallen. Ideological and political movements have taken hold of entire continents. Diseases and plagues have ravished millions. And through it all, Holy Mother Church has endured, standing as the one source of light in a world so often covered by shadows. In this thrilling narrative, Phillip Campbell takes children on a journey through Church history.

Scientology is one of the wealthiest and most powerful new religions to emerge in the past century. To its detractors, L. Ron Hubbard's space-age mysticism is a moneymaking scam and sinister brainwashing cult. But to its adherents, it is humanity's brightest hope. Few religious movements have been subject to public scrutiny like Scientology, yet much of what is written about the church is sensationalist and inaccurate.

In a tiny, dilapidated trailer in northeastern Oregon, a young woman saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in an ordinary landscape painting hanging on her bedroom wall. After being met with skepticism from the local parish, the matter was officially placed "under investigation" by the Catholic diocese. Investigative journalist Randall Sullivan wanted to know how, exactly, one might conduct the official inquiry into such an incident, so he set off to interview theologians, historians, and postulators.