English Church History

At the heart of power is a single family. They weren't elected but they live off the public purse. They aren't accountable to anyone, and yet between them they are privy to more government secrets than many cabinet ministers. Divinely appointed using a special hat, the head of the family is your superior, you his subject. Apparently he is guardian of our constitution - but we're also told he wouldn't dream of interfering in politics. If you accept the monarchy, you must accept the moral compromise that comes with it. But the good news is that we don't have to accept it.

A leading Catholic intellectual explains why the teachings of the Second Vatican Council are essential to the Church's future—and the world's The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was the most important Catholic event in the past five hundred years. Yet sixty years after its opening on...

The gripping, vividly told story of the largest POW escape in the Second World War – organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British jazz pianist and an American spy. In August 1944 the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place – 106 Allied prisoners were freed from a...

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2024 An award-winning journalist's exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics “A deeply reported, surprisingly personal exploration of a...

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture's most painful and unresolved issues. American culture focuses on...

Beyond a mere introduction to great art, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart is about loving to learn what art has to teach us about the wonder and struggle of being alive. Did you know that: Vincent van Gogh's attempt to start an artist's colony with Paul Gauguin lasted only nine weeks, ending in his...

As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, touching on questions such as: What behind-the-scenes politics touched off the turmoil in the Middle East?

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when clergyman charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been a part of American politics.

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.

How do art and faith intersect? How does art help us see our own lives more clearly? What can we understand about God and humanity by looking at the lives of artists? Striving for beauty, art also reveals what is broken. It presents us with the tremendous struggles and longings common to the...

Famously known as the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott, Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited helped shape the civil rights movement and changed our nation’s history forever. In this classic theological...

The world hates the Church that Jesus founded, just as He said it would (John 15:18). It reviles her doctrines, mocks her moral teachings and invents lies about her history. In every age, but especially in our modern day, historians and political powers have distorted the facts about her past (or just made up novel falsehoods from scratch) to make the Church, and the civilization it fostered, seem corrupt, backward, or simply evil.

In Germania, Roman historian Tacitus presents an impressive history of Germanic tribes and their societies. He dives deep, discussing everything from their ancestry to their government. The work also explores the similarities and differences between the values and customs of Roman and Germanic societies. Germania is a monumental ethnographic work that provides fascinating insight into early Germanic cultures and Roman attitudes toward them.

When three little girls—Anna, Bernie, and Elica—make a pact to be blood sisters for life, they believe nothing can come between them. Anna is from an affluent Jewish family, while Bernie and Elica are from poor Austrian families who barely make ends meet. As they get older, their social differences become all too real. With infectious Jew-hate-laden rhetoric from Nazi Germany spreading into Austria, it is only a matter of time before their bond of friendship gets severely tested.

The Apostolic Church: In the Twenty-First Century is a collection of articles and essays on the nature and mission of the church. Written in an accessible style, this book will help both ministers and laypersons understand how to live out their faith in the community we know as the church.

At the beginning of the book of the Revelation of St. John, John was commanded to "write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches". We know that these seven churches were named after cities in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). From the Book of Revelation itself, we have St. John's description of each Church:

In this compelling book, Scot McKnight shares his personal experience in the church as well as his study of the Apostle Paul to answer this significant question: What is the church supposed to be? For most of us the church is a place we go to on Sunday to hear a sermon or to participate in...

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

In the middle of the third century CE, one North African bishop wrote a treatise for the women of his church, exhorting them to resist such culturally normalized yet immodest behaviors in their cosmopolitan Roman city as mixed public bathing in the nude, and wearing excessive amounts of jewelry...

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