Here are 100 books that Unfinished Christians fans have personally recommended if you like
Unfinished Christians.
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Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
This engaging and delightfully written little book considers how we, as readers and “observers” of the changing Roman world, should think about the changes that came with Christian domination.
How do historians of the time—both Christian and non-Christian—try to “control the narrative” with literary motifs? How, on the other hand, can we be sure that the religion spread across the countryside? And what were those strange holy men doing?
The Christianisation of the Roman world lies at the root of modern Europe, yet at the time it was a tentative and piecemeal process. Peter Brown's study examines the factors which proved decisive and the compromises which made the emergence of the Christian 'thought world' possible. He shows how contemporary narratives wavered between declarations of definitive victory and a sombre sense of the strength of the pre-Christian past, reflecting the hopes and fears of different generations faced with different social and political situations. He examines the social factors which muted the sharp intolerance which pervades the contemporary literary evidence, and…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
This rich book lays out the vivid (and extensive) evidence for mixtures of Christianity and village traditions all over the post-Constantinian world (feasts and sacrifices, local saints and spirits, sacred trees and fountains).
Clearly, the notion of “the conversion of the Empire” is a vast overstatement since the Christianities we discover in early Christian literature and archaeology are highly idiosyncratic.
The slaughter of animals for religious feasts, the tinkling of bells to ward off evil during holy rites, the custom of dancing in religious services-these and many other pagan practices persisted in the Christian church for hundreds of years after Constantine proclaimed Christianity the one official religion of Rome. In this book, Ramsay MacMullen investigates the transition from paganism to Christianity between the fourth and eighth centuries. He reassesses the triumph of Christianity, contending that it was neither tidy nor quick, and he shows that the two religious systems were both vital during an interactive period that lasted far longer…
Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
Where most people imagine Christian belief and experience as something that takes place in the heart and mind, Cox Miller looks at the many ways that early Christianity worked through the senses.
Touch and taste, the visual experience of spectacle and image, the scents of churches and tombs, and the powerful presence of material “things” like relics all rendered Christianity a religion of physical experience more than mindful faith.
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.
The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
A vast amount of amulets come from the early Christian period in which the potent deeds and names of Christ, angels, apostles, and even Scripture passages were inscribed on papyri to be rolled up and worn or slipped in some part of the house.
These materials essentially made the stories and the scripture of Christianity into components of healing or protective magic (and some scholars have indeed suggested that such magical services constituted the actual context for the spread of Christianity). But who was responsible for these materials—for repurposing scripture and names as materials with concrete efficacy?
In this book, De Bruyn develops a picture of scribes dedicated not so much to the spread of the Gospel as the mediation of Christian scripture for material needs like health and fear.
Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice--the writing of incantations on amulets--changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were…
I do what I do for completely self-interested reasons. I am a woman, wife, and mother; a history professor specializing in the Catholic Church and gender; and a Christian (Episcopalian). I used to compartmentalize those roles. I was a Christian at church, a secular scholar at work, etc. It was exhausting. I was frustrated by conflicting messages about gender and faith from my family, profession, and religion. I wanted to be true to all aspects of my identity in all situations, but how? History is full of people who’ve questioned and adapted at the intersections of gender and religion. I learn from their journeys and add another piece of the puzzle.
Cooke makes us question what we think we know about gender.
MacCulloch makes us rethink what we think we know about Christianity. There are so many books of Christian history on the market it can be overwhelming. Many have social, theological, or political agendas. Not MacCulloch. A scholar of the first tier, MacCulloch unpacks Christianity, but this is no textbook.
With clarity and readability, MacCulloch rejects traditional Eurocentric narratives to explore Syriac churches, Thomist Christians in India, Orthodoxy, and the oft-forgotten Church of the East. He emphasizes how the strength of Christianity in all its different forms hasn’t been its supposedly unchanging nature but its adaptability—an important lesson to take into discussions of gender, lay roles, and religion.
Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, acclaimed history A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe, from ancient Palestine to contemporary China.
How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.
Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid…
I became interested in the art and written language of ancient Egypt due to its beauty and antiquity. Writing is art and art often contains text in this oldest written African language. I am fascinated with the process of religious change, intercultural interaction, and resistance to colonization. All of these themes are present in the study of the last functioning Egyptian temple, Philae, which is dedicated to the worship of Isis. What is often omitted from the history of this exceptional Egyptian temple is the fact that it was Nubians who defended and sustained the traditional religious practices long after most Egyptians had converted to Christianity. I wrote my book to research and share this neglected history.
“Long after ancient Egypt had been subdued by the Ptolemies and Rome, ancient Nubian civilization continued to thrive in late antiquity as an independent kingdom, first as a classical pharaonic culture and then as a Christian polity until the 15th century...like other forms of African Christianity that have been shaped by African traditional religions and culture. Nubian Christianity was fundamentally African.” Dr. Faraji’s book is a perfect complement to my own. As I trace the very late survivals of traditional pharaonic religion among the Nubians, Dr. Faraji teases out the earliest appearance of Christianity and traces its connections to the religions that preceded it.
The history of Late Antique Africa and the origins of Nubian Christianity have received little attention by Africanists and have been virtually ignored by Africana historians. For Nubiologists, church historians and scholars of late antiquity the story of this ancient African civilization and its conversion to Christianity has been primarily understood as an addendum to Greco-Roman classical antiquity thereby positioning ancient Nubia during late antiquity as a passive receptacle of culture as opposed to a historical actor emerging through the cultural anteriority of its own religious traditions. Ancient Nubia was at once a Nile Valley and Sudanic civilization. Its history…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am fascinated by humanity’s search for meaning. That is what I am exploring as I read philosophy and as I write my biographies of extraordinary individuals. Sue Prideaux has written award-winning books on Edvard Munch and his painting The Scream, the playwright August Strindberg, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. She acted as consultant to Sotheby’s when they sold The Scream for a record-breaking $120 million.
Nietzsche said “God is dead, but in thousands of years there still may be caves where his shadow will be shown.” Tom Holland traces the effect of the long shadow on our lives.
A "marvelous" (Economist) account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very…
I was infuriated to learn how my government was misrepresenting the recent war in Syria. I learned of this deceit from Syrians who had fled their war-torn country and relayed a very different narrative from the one we're all hearing. From 2016-17 Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History sponsored and archived our collection of audio-recorded interviews of Syrian Christians. This book is the end result of their entrusting us with their harrowing testimonies. I'm a Senior Lecturer in History at Baylor University. I routinely teach, among other courses, the history of the United States from a Global Perspective in which I discuss with my students the same lessons I learned while writing Syria Crucified.
For most people the concept of the Holy Land conjures up visions of Old Testament prophets and arcane holy wars whose harsh landscape was disrupted by the brief appearance of a first-century messiah which left the Roman and Hebrew world in upheaval. Journalist and historian Charles M. Sennott attempts to make sense of what are continuing realities of conflict and unease that the contemporary pilgrim will encounter when visiting the sacred sites connected to Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Sennot lived among those families who continue to make the Holy Land their home in order to better detail the complicated mosaic of modern conflicts involving Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinians that have shaped the political struggles of today.
As the Middle East has gone up in flames, no image so captured the clash of cultures as did the siege at the Church of the Nativity, where Christian monks were trapped inside the fortress-like church, as Palestinian gunmen faced off against the Israeli military for five weeks. As Muslim and Jew battled for control, the Christians were caught in the crossfire: endangered and largely forgotten, victims of somebody else's war. In The Body and the Blood, Charles M. Sennott examines the dwindling Christian communities of the modern Middle East in search of answers to the following questions: Why is…
Instead of experiencing a mid-life academic crisis, I discovered Canada. Through George Rawlyk, a senior historian at Queen’s University in Ontario, and then through many fruitful contacts with older and younger Canadians as well as frequent visits north of the border, I became increasingly intrigued by comparisons with U.S. history. Most of my specialized scholarship has treated American developments, but I have been able to explain those matters more perceptively by keeping Canada’s alternative history in mind. The chance to introduce undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame to Canadian history provided a regular stimulus to think about a common subject (Christianity) taking somewhat different shapes in the two nations.
In the sixteen years between this book’s two editions, religion in Canada underwent a revolution. John Webster Grant’s history of developments in Canada’s first century after Confederation (1867-1967) sparkled with wit, limpid prose, and telling incidents succinctly portrayed. His deep research in French sources, as well as English, made for an exceptionally well-balanced account of both Protestants and Catholics, both Quebec and the rest of Canada. The new chapter he added in 1988 was just as informative, perceptive, and wise about the difficult days for the churches that began so suddenly in the 1960s.
John Webster Grant?s The Church in the Canadian Era was originally published in 1972. It remains a classic and important text on the history of the Canadian churches since Confederation. This updated edition has been expanded to include a chapter on recent history as well as a new bibliographical survey. Its approach is ecumenical, taking account not only of the whole range of Christian denominations but of sources in both national languages.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Cory Hartman (DMin, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) collaboratively crafts practical tools, interactive processes, and breakthrough content for the Future Church Company, three interconnected organizations that exist to help the church embody the movement Jesus founded. I previously served as a pastor for thirteen years and founded Fulcrum Content, a gospel communication training organization.
Addison’s book lengthens and broadens Coleman’s Master Plan. While Coleman focuses on Jesus’ selection, training, and sending of his twelve closest disciples, Addison also examines what Jesus did before he named the Twelve, including rich historical background of his ministry context in first-century Palestine. In this way, Addison sheds light on how to engage unreached people who are still far from committing themselves to learn from Jesus.
Addison discerns a recurring six-step pattern in Jesus’ activity, in the early Palestinian church, in Paul’s Mediterranean travels, and in global disciple-making movements today. Importantly, he lays out these steps in a way that contemporary Western Christians unused to Jesus’ method can begin practicing them together.
Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year
Sometimes we get so caught up in the power of Jesus shouting from the cross, "It is finished!" that we forget that Jesus started something. What Jesus started was a movement that began small, with intimate conversations designed to build disciples into apostles who would go out in the world and seed it with God's kingdom vision. That movement grew rapidly and spread wide as people recognized the truth in it and gave their lives to the power of it. That movement is still happening today, and we are called to play our part…
