Product Description
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A History of Christianity, a six-part series presented by
Diarmaid MacCulloch, an Oxford history professor whose books
about Cranmer and the Reformation have been accled as
masterpieces. A History Of Christianity will reveal the true
origins of Christianity and delve into what it means to be a
Christian. Intelligent, thought-provoking and magisterial in its
the series will uncover how a small Jewish sect that
preached humility became the biggest religion in the world. Most
Christian histories start with St Paul's mission to Rome, but
Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that the first Christianity stayed
much closer to its Middle-Eastern roots. He describes not only
the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its
organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics,
sex, and human society. The series includes subjects from
Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from
Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco
to Korea in the twentieth. MacCulloch is one of the most widely
travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as
arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the
development of Christian history differently from any of his
predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its
earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next
1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the
western Church was by no means always the most important: he
observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of
Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely
capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. This is the first
truly global history of Christianity. Diarmaid MacCulloch is one
of the world's leading historians and Professor of History of the
Church and Fellow at St. Cross College Oxford. The series is a
BBC co-production with the Open University and Jerusalem
Productions. Giftbox set of 6 one hour DVDs
Features:
Closed Captioned
Spanish Subtitles
Programs in the series: Program 1: The First Christianity
Program 2: Catholicism: The Unpredictable Rise of Rome Program 3:
Orthodoxy: From Empire to Empire Program 4: Reformation: The
Individual Before God Program 5: Protestantism: The Evangelical
Explosion Program 6: God in Dock
Review
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Anyone having second thoughts about wading into Oxford professor
Diarmaid MacCullough's New York Times bestselling doorstop
(nearly 1,200 pages) A History of Christianity will be delighted
(and perhaps relieved) to discover this six-hour BBC adaptation
filmed in high-definition and amiably hosted by the author
himself as he follows the path of Christianity through the ages
and around the globe... An enlightening and often entertaining
survey that mixes trenchant observation with beautiful
on-location footage in some of the world's most luminous
places of worship, A History of Christianity is highly
recommended. (3 1/2 stars) --Video Librarian
A solid library purchase, this enlightening program is filled
with wonderful location footage and thought provoking concepts.
--Booklist
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About the Actor
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Diarmaid MacCulloch is the author of The Reformation, winner of
the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Wolfson Prize, and
the British Academy Prize, and of Thomas Cranmer, winner of the
Whitbread Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper
Prize. Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford
University, he was brought up in a country rectory in East
Anglia.
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