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Christianity
- The First Three Thousand Years
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 46 hrs and 29 mins
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Summary
Once in a generation, a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read and heard - a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Breathtaking in ambition, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith.
Christianity will teach modern listeners things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. We follow the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions and confrontations in Africa and Asia. And we discover the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany and England. This audiobook encompasses all of intellectual history - we meet monks and crusaders, heretics and saints, slave traders and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in driving the enlightenment and the age of exploration, and shaping the course of World War I and World War II.
We are living in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers and non-believers are deeply engaged by questions of religion and tradition, seeking to understand the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of God. The son of an Anglican clergyman, MacCulloch writes with deep feeling about faith. His last book, The Reformation, was chosen by dozens of publications as Best Book of the Year and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This awe-inspiring follow-up is a landmark new history of the faith that continues to shape the world.
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- James Uscroft
- 10-06-21
The Longest Wikipedia Page You'll Ever Read -_-
Although the author deserves applause for even 'ATTEMPTING' to write something as monumental as a history of Christianity from its origins in Judaism and Classical Greek culture to the "Culture Wars" of today, the very nature of such a Herculean feat means that the result was always doomed to be both somehow ridiculously long, 'AND' ludicrously short. By which I mean that in seeking to at least mention every major, significant and/or pivotal event in the history of the development of Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch had no choice but to reduce key events and eras of history which could be (and almost always are) the subjects of entire books unto themselves to little more than bullet point summaries. Meaning that invariably, when he raised a subject in which I was genuinely interested, before I even knew it, he'd moved on to the next, leaving me to Google the subject for myself before once again returning to wade through the seemingly endless sea of "And then this happened, then this happened, and then that happened as well" while groaning with despair as I realised that I was nowhere near close to being done.
Indeed, the seemingly endless string of one event after another and one biography after another made any kind of engagement with or retention of the information presented impossible as the very nature of the project forced to the author to compose a narrative that was as wide as an ocean but as shallow as a teaspoon. So in summary then, in spite of the magnificent efforts by the author to create a 'Comprehensive' history of Christianity, this book is caught in the paradoxical limbo of being 'FAR' too long to be an introductory summary, but composed of entries that are so short and superficial that it can't possibly be anything else.
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- Andrew
- 07-04-23
Bad Author, worse narrator
Why is a book about Christianity being written by a man who clearly does not believe what Christians believe. It means the whole writing includes a bias which is unfair and prejudice. It would be the equivalent of Keir Starmer being told to write a book about the Conservative Party. He knows politics, he probably knows the conservative party history, but there's no way he can portray it neutrally or fairly.
The narrator tops the terrible author. For some reason, only known to the publisher, they chose a bad American narrator to narrate a book written by a Scottish man who has an English accent.
Oh woe is me!
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