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The pressing need to curb religious rhetoric that breeds fanaticism

How did Christianity develop and evolve into one of the world’s great religions? In A History of Christianity: The First 3,000 Years (Allen Lane, 1,216 pages), Diarmaid MacCulloch, church history professor at the University of Oxford and fellow of St Cross College-Oxford, takes a deep and sweeping but dispassionate look not only into the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality but also into how Christianity has changed politics, sex, and human society. About the subject of his book, MacCulloch writes: “I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems.” He adds, though, that the faith is a perpetual argument about meaning and reality: “I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”

Christianity

MacCulloch finds a like-minded, sympathetic soul in Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, who reviews A History of Christianity for the April 4, 2010 Sunday Book Review of The New York Times. In an essay entitled “Thine is the Kingdom,” Meacham  says that he takes the faith of his fathers seriously, if unemotionally: “I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up.” But he qualifies his position: “I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.”

Meacham observes that questions of meaning—who are we, how shall we live, where are we going?—tend to be framed in theological and philosophical terms, but when it comes to matters of faith, he believes that history matters, too. And he agrees with MacCulloch when the latter says that historians also have this moral task: “They should seek to promote sanity and to curb the rhetoric which breeds fanaticism.”

Read Jon Meacham’s “Thine is the Kingdom” in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford (since 1997) and Fellow (formerly Senior Tutor) of St Cross College, Oxford (since 1995). Though ordained as a deacon in the Church of England, he declined ordination to the priesthood for political reasons. His book Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (2003) won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2004 British Academy Book Prize. He earlier won the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biographical book Thomas Cranmer: A Life. His latest book, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, was published in September 2009.

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