The Book Depository The Triumph of Christianity by Rodney Stark
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Description: The Triumph of Christianity : Paperback : Harper Collins Publishers Inc : 9780062007698 : 0062007696 : 06 Nov 2012 : Celebrated religious and social historian Rodney Starktraces the extraordinary rise of Christianity through its most pivotal andcontroversial moments to offer fresh perspective on the history of the world slargest religion. In The Triumph of Christianity, the author of God s Battalions and The Rise of Christianity gathers and refines decadesof powerful research and discovery into one concentrated, concise, and highlyreadable volume that explores Christianity s most crucial episodes. The uniqueformat of Triumph of Christianity allows Stark to avoid densechronologies and difficult back stories, bringing readers right to the heart of Christian history s most vital controversies and enduring lessons. The Book Depository The Triumph of Christianity by Rodney Stark - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780062007698
MPN: 0062007696
GTIN: 9780062007698
Author: Glen
Rating: 5
Review: I could not put this book down. It was phenomenal! Not only immensely readable, but mind-blowing in its depth and scope. After reading some chapters, I was so amazed that I doubted what I had read, and so went to see just how biased it was. It turned out that Professor Stark was in fact simply stating the truth, and I was behind the times! Whether you are studying history, theology, sociology or even science, this is a must-read.
Author: Jordan M. Poss
Rating: 4
Review: Rodney Stark has become one of my favorite writers since I discovered God's Battalions, his corrective history of the Crusades. The book busted myth after myth with carefully researched and presented fact, and Stark's other books have done the same. The Triumph of Christianity is no exception--Stark takes numerous popular ideas about the history of Christianity and corrects or outright demolishes them. Especially good are his chapters on the involvement of women in early Christianity. Against many popular feminist critiques from the last fifty years or so--which generally emphasize the "repressive" character of Christian gender roles compared to enlightened present-day models--Stark shows that not only did Christianity offer women a life and system of belief vastly superior to that offered by paganism, it was rapidly and widely embraced by women at a pace far outstripping that of men. Wealthy women were particularly important members and benefactors of the early Church. And it did improve their lives, which Stark advocates as the primary reason for the triumph of Christianity--something of an Applied Pascal's Wager. Stark also points out the role of wealth in the early Church. Far from the poor and sickly to whom Christianity supposedly appealed at the beginning (an argument popularized by Marx), Stark shows that the wealthy were among the earliest and most numerous converts to the new faith. Jesus himself, far from having been "a desert handyman," as an episode of "Community" put it, could be more accurately described as a contractor working in a rapidly growing section of Judaea--he was also literate and well educated. Stark does solid corrective work on the Crusades again, essentially distilling God's Battalion's into an excellent chapter on the movement, and addresses issues like the Inquisition, which he demonstrates was neither a single institution (there were multiple Inquisitions which operated differently based on time and location), nor as draconian or as bloody as stereotyped. I could go much further, but other reviewers have already pointed out other strong points of Stark's book--and there are many. I want to address one enormous problem I had with the book, also relating to the Middle Ages. As related by the evangelical magazine World, which selected The Triumph of Christianity as its Book of the Year (and rightly so), one of the myths Stark demolishes is of the medieval "Age of Faith," a period of widespread and intense personal piety through all levels of society. This may very well be a myth worth discarding, but Stark hardly demolishes it. The problem is primarily one of evidence and application. Stark relies on a handful of anecdotal complaints about church attendance and clerical literacy from widely separated periods of medieval history, as well as surveys undertaken by the Lutheran church establishment from the middle and late 16th century. These surveys found dismal church attendance and many churches with vacant pulpits of absentee clergy. As to the anecdotal evidence, preachers have complained about church attendance since there was a Church, and is church attendance necessarily equated with religious literacy? In a society with extensive means of lay involvement in religion, the answer would seem to be no. As to the surveys, how is evidence from Post-Reformation German Lutherans supposed to indicate anything about religiosity in Anglo-Saxon England? Crusade-era Languedoc? High Medieval Rhineland? The point is that Stark's evidence is too narrowly localized in place and time to apply to the entire 1,000-year sweep of medieval Europe. "The Middle Ages" and "medieval Europe" are misleading terms for many reasons, but one very important reason is that they imply sameness for numerous cultures varying greatly over many languages, thousands of miles, and many centuries. And if the enormous popularity of religious lay movements, pilgrimage, Crusading, benefaction to religious orders, religiously-oriented guilds, or even the construction of the cathedrals doesn't argue for popular piety, the scholarship of people like Eamon Duffy (who has carefully reconstructed popular religion in medieval and Reformation Britain, to name one place) should. Furthermore, Stark builds on his market-based hypothesis for the success of Christianity to suggest the reason Christianity stagnated in medieval Europe was monopoly control of the religious "market" by the Catholic Church which squelched rival options and offered one--and only one--means of "doing" religion. This idea would certainly tickle the ears of the anti-Catholic Fundamentalists I grew up with, but is by no means borne out by a close look at the period. To cite just one example, the sudden rise and growth of the mendicant monastic orders (especially the Franciscans and Dominicans) in the 13th century was an orthodox response to the popularity of Cathar heresy, which usually stressed asceticism at the expense of crucial Christian doctrine. Though skeptical, the Church gave its blessing to the orders and similar movements and their popularity boomed. All this is to say that, far from criticizing Stark's market thesis, I believe that if he researched further he would find that the medieval period reinforces it as a positive example. Like I said, I don't doubt that there were many places in medieval Europe in which Stark's thesis would apply--but the broadstrokes application and weak research on this topic doesn't conclusively demonstrate that. I've complained in detail about that section of the book, but I still highly recommend The Triumph of Christianity. It does far, far more good than harm, and perhaps a book on medieval Christianity from Stark, researched with the same diligence he put into his books on the Crusades and early Christianity, would add nuance to his arguments. Recommended.
