Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Napoleon had a genius for the public gesture. In 481 King Childeric, father of Clovis, the first Christian king of what became France, had been buried in what is now the city of Tournai. Childeric’s richly furnished grave was rediscovered beside a Roman fort in 1653, becoming the subject of Europe’s first detailed archaeological report. Among the many precious objects recovered were hundreds of little gold-and-garnet bees (some think that they were actually badly drawn eagles); they had probably decorated a rich cloak or horse-covering. Most of them disappeared in a burglary in the nineteenth century, but before that the bees caught Napoleon’s imagination, and he adopted them as his dynastic emblem because he could thus identify himself with a French monarch who predated but had literally fathered the ancient Christian monarchy so recently destroyed by the French Revolution. The Bona-partes’ bees could thus upstage the old French royal family’s symbol of the fleur-de-lys; it was an adroit attempt to remould traditional Christendom, rather like the Concordat itself. Napoleon had grasped a truth which had eluded the Revolutionaries whose commitment to the Enlightenment spurred them to abolish the past: tradition and history had their own authority, which could become the ally of change, and at the heart of that tradition in western Europe was Christianity.81 Popular enthusiasm greeted Pius VII on his visit to Paris in 1804. That surprised everyone, but it was all of a piece with the fierce resistance to the Revolution in parts of France, and with the fury which had confronted the Emperor Joseph II’s attempted monastic confiscations in the Austrian Netherlands. This was the beginning of a new era of popular Catholic activism, increasingly directed towards a charismatic papacy. The popular mood was only strengthened when Napoleon seized papal territories in Italy in 1809, and the Emperor effectively imprisoned Pius for four years. The papacy’s sufferings at the hands of the Revolution transformed the Pope from ineffectual Italian prince to a confessor for the Faith, pitied throughout Europe. Significantly, even in Protestant England, centuries of anti-papal prejudice were weakened by sympathy for the enemy of England’s enemy. Already refugee Catholic priests and monks had been welcomed to England as victims of the Revolution, something inconceivable before 1789. A further catastrophe for the Church indirectly benefited the Pope. In 1803 all the ecclesiastical territories in the Holy Roman Empire ruled by prince-bishops and abbots were turned over to secular governance, and huge amounts of Church property confiscated; henceforth more than half of German Catholics were under the rule of Protestants.82 Often these prelates, secure in their ancient privileges, had shown scant respect for His Holiness. Now they were gone, and in 1806 the Pope also saw the end of that traditional counterweight to papal power, the Holy

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  out against the culture round them to reach across the racial barrier within Evangelicalism. Belle Harris Bennett, epitome of well-bred white Kentucky Methodism, was central to Southern support for overseas missions, and the founder of a college which also trained women for work at home on civil rights and social projects. She campaigned against lynching, and made sure that the great black activist W. E. B. Du Bois was invited to interracial Methodist gatherings, where she used the force of her personality to ban segregated seating.21 When, in the 1950s, civil rights activists began to campaign against Southern racism, there was a groundswell of support which could look back to affirmations like this. Among the leadership was Martin Luther King Jr, a Baptist minister and son of another who had taken the name of Martin Luther for himself and his son, inspired by his visit to Germany. When the younger King began campaigning for civil rights, his insistence on non-violent struggle had two roots: one, the Bible; the other, the campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi, whose family he had visited in India. In King, the Evangelicalism of the South met the writings of one of the greatest exponents of the ‘Social Gospel’ in the USA, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose synthesis of Reformed and Lutheran theology and liberal Protestant analysis of society he much admired. Perhaps the greatest achievement in King’s career, prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to put all the skills developed in his rather chequered political career behind an act to protect black voting rights, was a pair of marches through Alabama from Selma to the state capital Montgomery in 1965. In the first, hundreds of marchers, hastily gathered through Sunday sermons from King and his colleagues after the murder of a civil rights worker, were brutally attacked and tear-gassed by state police – fatally for the credibility of Southern government, in full view of television cameras. When King called a new march for two days later to commemorate the brutality, clergy of all denominations from across the nation, and representatives of faith beyond Christianity, poured into Selma. It was one of the most remarkable demonstrations of ecumenism and multi-faith action against injustice yet seen in the world.22 Faced with an order from the state authorities to turn back, King used his authority over the crowds to abandon their march rather than provoke further suffering. This might have seemed like humiliation, but once more King’s enemies ruined their cause that same night by their street murder of a Unitarian minister from faraway Massachusetts, who had been among the Selma marchers. A few days later, when President Johnson – wily old Texan politician shocked into uncharacteristic moral indignation – spoke to Congress to back the Voting Rights Act, he ended incongruously but with sensational effectiveness by

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Roman Oratory, Gasparo Contarini, a Venetian nobleman and diplomat, who helped to set up a similar group in Venice. Around 1511 he experienced the sort of spiritual crisis that a few years later overtook Luther, and it had a similar result. When Lutherans began preaching Luther’s message of free justification by faith, Contarini recognized what they were saying, and he devoted his distinguished later career in the Church to an effort (ultimately vain) to bring the opposed sides together. In the 1530s he became acquainted with Juan de Valdés, and introduced him to a cultured English émigré, Reginald Pole. Pole was born with a rather better hereditary claim to the throne of England than King Henry VIII; after some hesitation (a feature of his whole career), he bit the royal hand that was feeding him in his expensive Italian education and sided with the King’s wronged wife Catherine of Aragon, leading to permanent exile in Italy. Pole’s enforced leisure, exalted birth and reasonably comfortable income combined with a strong sense of duty and a thoughtful, introspective piety to make him a major player in Italian theological ferment. Like Contarini, he emphasized the central role of grace by faith in the Christian life, and he was not blind to the fact that Martin Luther had proclaimed the same message. The oratories did not simply foster elite or clerical spirituality. One of their founding inspirations had been a woman, and now a relatively humble and not especially educated woman, Angela Merici, companion to a widowed noblewoman in Brescia, made it her goal to encourage single women to embrace a religious life while living in their own homes, rather like the early beguines in northern Europe. She laid down no specific tasks for her association, but she was insistent that only virgin women – not even widows – could join. To underline her intention, she took as her symbolic patron a supposed fourth-century martyr, St Ursula. The point was that Ursula, in the course of what appears to have been a scribal error in a medieval manuscript, had acquired eleven thousand virgin companions, all massacred by an industrious army of Huns near Cologne. In a true miracle, these fictional ladies now became reality in Italy and far beyond: a host of enthusiastic Ursulines, thirsting to help a rather startled and intimidated male-run Church. The Ursulines considered their options and began concentrating on working among the poor and teaching children in settings which men either did not want to or could not enter. In 1544 Pope Paul III supplied a Rule which moulded them into something more like a traditional religious order, but still its model was the free-form adaptability of the Augustinians (see p. 392), and crucially it did not provide for central direction. From the 1560s Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, a great believer in central control so long as he was at the centre, sought to discipline the Ursulines under his jurisdiction by forming them into an order

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  “Where does Christianity begin? In Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome? How did the early creeds of the church develop and differentiate? What was the impact of the Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation? How have vital Christian communities emerged in Asia, Africa, and India since the eighteenth century? Award-winning historian MacCulloch attempts to answer these questions and many more in this elegantly written, magisterial history of Christianity. … He offers sketches of Christian thinkers from Augustine and Luther to Desmond Tutu. … His monumental achievement will not soon be surpassed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book. MacCulloch is to be congratulated for his accessible handling of so much complex, difficult material. … He keeps the reader engaged with wit and choice anecdotes and throughout the entire book he retains his own distinctive, slightly irreverent perspective, and an unerring instinct for when to go from macro to micro history.” —John Cornwell, Financial Times “A triumphantly executed achievement. This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language.” —Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury “[MacCulloch’s] writing is brilliant, critical, inspiring, humorous.” —Brother Curtis, The Society of Saint John the Evangelist “Excellent … I suspect it will quickly become the go-to book for those seeking information on this major world religion.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s splendid account of Christianity’s long, momentous, non-ignorable life among us is in one way an account of everything that has gone on during the three millennia in which he sets his story. … A well- informed and—bless the man—witty narrative, fluent, well-judged and wholly free of cant. Christianity, the book, is more than informative, more than measured and temperate. It’s enjoyable—a jolly good read.” —The Washington Times “I heartily recommend Christianity to anyone with an interest in the history of the Church. The book is very accessible and readable. Both the novice and the expert should find it profitable. Believers will find challenges which we should be willing to face, and which should be a catalyst for some appropriate soul- searching. Cynics may just find some things that might make them willing to open up a dialog with the Faithful.” —HollywoodJesus.com “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental book is essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it, while those who protest indifference may be ambushed by surprise at its force in world culture over the millenniums.” —Melvyn Bragg, The Observer, choosing Christianity as Book of the Year

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  combatant, Primate of All England, compellingly distils an exceptional historical imagination into R. Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (London, 2005). A. F. Walls, The Cross-cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith (Edinburgh, 2001), provides a refreshing perspective from an expert on the history of Christian mission, with an enviably wide chronological sweep. Beyond these, there are multi-volume surveys of the field, notably the Oxford History of the Christian Church: a series of individually authored stand-alone studies of particular periods, still sailing as majestic in their blue livery as a twentieth-century ocean liner, and edited by the brothers O. and H. Chadwick, themselves the embodiment of one era in European church history. Fine multi- authored volumes of the Cambridge History of Christianity cover the whole span in nine volumes, and single-authored volumes in the I. B. Tauris History of the Christian Church provide crisp surveys also aiming to span the history of the Church. I cite particular volumes from all three of these series in section bibliographies below. The same survey task is performed by expert multiple authors in a single volume: A. Hastings (ed.), A World History of Christianity (Grand Rapids, 1999). An astonishing, not to say daunting, multi-volume account of Christian theology by one of the princes of American liberal Protestant theology is J. J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (5 vols., Chicago and London, 1971–89). Even more monumental, from a great Jesuit intellectual historian, is F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy (9 vols., London, 1946–75). Western Christianity is so inextricably tangled with Western culture that it is worth consulting the comfortingly sensible synthesis of J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London and New York, 1996). The tangle is interestingly interpreted from a classic Jesuit background in J. O’Malley, Four Cultures of the West (Cambridge, MA, 2004). The mystical and spiritual dimension of Christianity is dealt with in L. Bouyer, A History of Christian Spirituality (3 vols., London, 1968–9). The Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series, with volumes now running into triple figures, is a user-friendly series of translations presenting a rich variety of Western spiritual writers. One tradition within the West can be sampled in G. Rowell, K. Stevenson and R. Williams, Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford, 1989). Christian history lends itself to particular themes treated over long periods. A model of popular history covering two millennia is E. Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (3rd edn, New Haven and London, 2006), engagingly supplemented by R. Collins, Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy (London, 2009), and, on an allied theme, there is wise guidance and

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  # Book - Christianity (Part 1 - 1000BCE-100CE) # Source: sources/books-inbox/Book - Christianity (Part 1 - 1000BCE-100CE).pdf # Extracted via pypdf (ASN-512, 2026-04-22) # Pages: 89 (empty: 1) Praise for Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and surprisingly accessible volume on the subject than MacCulloch’s. This is not a book to be taken lightly. … To me its appeal lies in its illuminating explications of things so apparently obvious that they would seem to require no explanation.” —Jon Meacham, The New York Times Book Review “A tour de force. The most brilliant point of this remarkable book is its identification of the U.S. as the prime example of the kind of nation the reformers hoped to create.” —Paul Johnson, The Spectator “This ambitious project represents the first attempt in decades by a major historian of Christianity—MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church at Oxford—to craft a one-volume narrative of the faith from its origin to the present. … The engaging narrative and incisive analysis for which he is renowned make this work an essential companion for any student of Christianity.” —Commonweal “At a time when quarrels between believers and nonbelievers, new atheists and old faithfuls, dominate so much of our public discourse, Diarmaid MacCulloch has given us the one thing that we most need—not polemic but history, high, wide and lucid, and, given the enormity of his task, often winningly light of touch. Taking as his subject nothing less than the whole history of the faith, he has written a social history that illuminates changes in belief; and a history of belief that helps us see how our society got so much of its structure. … Throughout he achieves a near-perfect match of narrative flair and analytic detail. In the best old-fashioned, classical sense, we are offered here a ‘pageant’ of people and events. … [He] reminds us that history matters.” —Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of Paris to the Moon and judge of the 2010 Cundill Prize in History “He brings an insider’s wit to tracing the fate of official Christianity in an age of doubt, and to addressing modern surges of zeal, from Mormons to Pentecostals.” —The Economist

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  through the social revolution percolating the vast expanses of the empire from the West. An incentive for enthusiastic pastoral care was the extraordinarily high level of churchgoing, which contrasted with the perceptible declines in the West: in 1900, 87 per cent of male and 91 per cent of female believers were recorded at confession and communion, marginally higher figures than in 1797.76 It was Filaret, the Metropolitan of Moscow, a churchman whose liberal reputation led to his complete exclusion from meetings of the Holy Synod between 1836 and 1855, who drafted one of the most idealistic reforming measures of the century to originate with a tsar, Alexander II’s decree freeing the serfs of Russia in 1861.77 As social misery exceeded the capacity of traditional monastic charity, Orthodoxy creatively revived an institution which had served it well in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the crisis years around the Union of Brest (see p. 538): confraternities which would organize charity in the worst areas of deprivation in Russian cities. The secular clergy of nineteenth-century Russia, in contrast to its monks, have traditionally had a bad press, but that is at least in part because they have most commonly been viewed through the eyes of Russian novelists and writers who had little sympathy for the realities of life in the thousands of rural parishes through the empire. It is possible to tell a different story from the autobiographies of sons of the clergy. Even if they were idealizing their backgrounds, their accounts reveal a world of high-minded austerity, pride in vocation, admiration for learning and concern for parishioners which is remarkably reminiscent of the standards aspired to in the Western Protestant manse.78 There was another similarity to the West: amid a welter of initiatives for social welfare, education, mission at home and in the furthest corners of the empire, Orthodoxy experienced that new phenomenon, the general rise of women’s activism in Christian practice. Here it was seen most clearly in monasticism, now undergoing a major revival after Catherine the Great’s Enlightenment-inspired government had sorely restricted it. While the number of male religious slightly more than doubled between 1850 and 1912 to just over 21,000, the number of women in monastic life had risen astonishingly from 8,533 to 70,453.79 The problem for an institution which was inextricably part of the everyday life of a great imperial society was how to minister to a society in sharp debate about its identity. Alexander II was an autocrat who in 1861 had borrowed the great principle of 1789, to give the bulk of his subjects their personal freedom: was he the only person in Russia entitled to have liberal ideals? The spread of higher education created a caste of articulate and ambitious young men with little precedent for their position in Russian society; they were as awkwardly placed

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  particular field tend to share basic assumptions about their subject. Social scientists are no exception; they rely on a view of human nature that provides the background of most discussions of specific behaviors but is rarely questioned. Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly. We documented systematic errors in the thinking of normal people, and we traced these errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion. Our article attracted much more attention than we had expected, and it remains one of the most highly cited works in social science (more than three hundred scholarly articles referred to it in 2010). Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy. For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common. For several weeks after Michael Jackson’s death, for example, it was virtually impossible to find a television channel reporting on another topic. In contrast, there is little coverage of critical but unexciting issues that provide less drama, such as declining educational standards or overinvestment of medical resources in the last year of life. (As I write this, I notice that my choice of “little-covered” examples was guided by availability. The topics I chose as examples are mentioned often; equally important issues that are less available did not come to my mind.) We did not fully realize it at the time, but a key reason for the broad appeal of “heuristics and biases” outside psychology was an incidental feature of our work: we almost always included in our articles the full text of the questions we had asked ourselves and our respondents. These questions served as demonstrations for the reader, allowing him to recognize how his own thinking

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On October 31, 1967, just a month before he was to return home, Captain Riley L. Pitts of the U.S. Army led his company on an assault of a Vietcong position in the dense jungle of Ap Dong, South Vietnam. After enduring withering fire, Pitts threw his body on top of an enemy hand grenade and waited to die. When the grenade failed to explode, Pitts moved his company forward, putting himself in the direct line of enemy fire until he was cut down in a hailstorm of bullets. As the crew of Apollo 8 arrived with their wives at the White House, Capt. Pitts’s widow, Eula, laid out a dark suit and a bow tie for her five-year-old son, Mark, and a fine white blouse for her seven-year-old daughter, Stacie, at their home in Oklahoma City. The next day, the president would make her husband the first African American officer ever to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Millions of Americans considered astronauts to be the epitome of American courage. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, that label better belonged to men like Pitts. Joining the crew of Apollo 8 and their wives at the black tie gala were twenty other astronauts, Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, and former NASA chief James Webb, who was to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later in the evening. Also present was Charles Lindbergh, who’d stunned the world when he flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. To many at NASA, despite his controversial political views, Lindbergh was a pinnacle aviation hero, a man who had taken to the skies to do the impossible. Before dinner, a small concert was staged in the East Room. When Valerie Anders took her place in the audience, she was dismayed to hear dozens of people coughing and sneezing. This is so stupid, she thought. They are putting this crew at risk. And yet there was no escape for any of them. So they stayed, droplets of the Hong Kong flu and who knows what else atomizing into the room. During dinner, Kraft got to talking to Lindbergh about airplanes, a nuts-and-bolts conversation between one of the great original aviators and an old flight test engineer. Seated nearby with the president, Borman stole glances toward Kraft’s table, envying the conversation he was missing. He also noticed that LBJ seemed irascible, describing his annoyance at a press corps—and maybe an entire swath of the American public—whose criticism of his Vietnam policies seemed to have beaten him down. Listening to the president rail against the media, Borman felt empathy for Johnson, not just for the stigma of Vietnam that would attach to his legacy, but for how it must feel to be a man in the final days of his standing, knowing that soon he would never again matter in the way he once had.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Christianity which, in its development as ‘Anglicanism’, has sometimes looked with some distaste on its Reformation inheritance from the Cranmer years. One incomparable aspect of the book is the language in which it was written, which even those who distrust its theological content can unreservedly admire. The processes of the Prayer Book’s original construction will probably always remain obscure, but it is evident that a single powerful voice lies behind its phrasing and that can only be Cranmer’s. The unity of the book, and the subtle way in which it draws on and transforms an astonishing variety of earlier texts in Latin, German and English, indicate that Cranmer was very much more than simply the chairman of a drafting committee. His particular literary genius was narrowly for formal prose, without the range of conversational or dramatic tones of which Tyndale was capable, but prose which can be spoken generation on generation without seeming trite or tired – words now worn as smooth and strong as a pebble on a beach. The Archbishop bequeathed first England and then the whole world a liturgical drama which he wished to be enacted by all those present in an act of worship; and so it has proved. The words of his Prayer Book have been recited by English-speakers far more frequently than the speeches and soliloquies of Shakespeare. Fragments remain even with the unchurched: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part’, or from another resonant moment in human experience, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.40 Cranmer’s words are the common inheritance of all those who use English, that language which in his age was so marginal to European cultural life, yet is now so universal. Besides its prose, Cranmer’s Prayer Book has left one liturgical legacy to all Western Christendom: an evening service or ‘office’ called Evensong. Evensong is the part of the Prayer Book now most regularly performed in Anglicanism, and so it is there that Cranmer’s superbly dignified prose is still most frequently appreciated in its proper context. Cranmer had a particular aptitude for creating the short prayers known as ‘collects’, of which he wrote a set for the changing weeks of his new English liturgical year (considerably simplified from the pre- Reformation yearly kalendar of holy days). These small jewels of prayers are rarely simply his own work, but their expression and the delicately precise choice of language are his. One of the briefest of all, second of the Evensong collects used throughout the year, is also one of the most memorable. It was a translation of an existing eighth-century collect from the Latin West, but Cranmer tweaked the text in his own way. Taking its controlling metaphor from the setting of the service in the fading evening light, the collect is a perfectly balanced threefold structure: a petition of two thoughts is followed by an appeal to the Trinitarian relationship of Father and Son. Cranmer has characteristically

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  that the anti-Trinitarians became known as ‘Socinians’ after two further Italian radicals, Lelio Francesco Sozini (Socinus), whose nephew Fausto Paolo Sozzini [sic] brought his teachings to Poland. Remarkably swiftly, in 1569 the anti- Trinitarians were even able to open their own institution of higher education in Poland, the Raków Academy, complete with printing press: the Catechism of Raków produced in 1609 became in its Latin version an internationally known statement of anti-Trinitarian belief. The academy was at the heart of another effort to provide an alternative to the normal organization of society: like the communitarian Hutterites enjoying an oasis of freedom in Moravia, the community held property in common, embraced strict pacifist principles and observed no distinctions of rank. Unlike the Hutterites, Raków was not suspicious of independent thinking or advanced learning. It represented the most thoroughgoing challenge so far to sixteenth- century Europe’s hierarchical assumptions, yet there was much else in the fertile variety of Polish radical Christianity. Anti-Trinitarians also argued in their Church gatherings as to whether or not Christian believers were justified in possessing serfs, for the very practical reason that patrons of anti-Trinitarian congregations there were normally serf-owning noblemen. This was a very different version of radical Christianity from that of the unassuming Hutterite craftsmen of central Europe.63 In what was then Lithuania (now Belarus), Simon Budny, a long-lived scholar with a tendency to change his mind which disconcerted even the anti-Trinitarians, published his first version of the Polish Bible in 1572. In its preparation, several rabbis of the Karaites, a branch of Judaism which like Protestantism respected only what it saw as the literal meaning of scripture, amicably cooperated with this Protestant Christian who emphasized his admiration for the Tanakh.64 Amid the competitive religious market which was Poland-Lithuania in the mid-sixteenth century, its leaders launched political changes with profound implications for the future of the region. First came the restructuring of their polity in the Union of Lublin of 1569 (see p. 533) and then an opportunity to enshrine religious pluralism in the constitution of the commonwealth. King Sigismund Augustus died in 1572: after a tragically tumultuous marital history, he was the last of the Jagiellon male line. Now the provisions in the constitutional settlement of the Union of Lublin came into operation: the election of a new monarch was in the hands of the noblemen of the commonwealth. A majority was determined to keep the Habsburgs from adding to their collection of European thrones, and the obvious alternative candidate would come from the Habsburgs’ chief dynastic rivals in Europe, the Valois dynasty of France. Accordingly, negotiations began with the younger brother of King Charles IX,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of nuns, but even then, Merici’s original vision of individuality survived and inspired new Ursuline initiatives. Under the cloak of Ursuline identity, a number of strong-minded women pressed their own vision of vocation in the Church and seized varied opportunities offered to them, with a judiciously deaf ear to alternative plans laid down by the hierarchy. It was a recurrent pattern in the Catholic Reformation.4 Juan de Valdés eventually settled in Naples, Spanish-governed but happily free from the Spanish Inquisition, where from his arrival in 1535 he developed a circle of friends, wealthy or talented or both, who shared his passion for humanist learning and for promoting a vital, engaged Christian faith. They included two powerful preachers, leading figures in their respective religious orders, Bernardino Ochino from a newly founded Franciscan reformed order named the Capuchins, and Piermartire Vermigli (‘Peter Martyr’ in his later north European career), an Augustinian who became Abbot of San Pietro ad Aram in Naples. Both men set off on individual paths. Brooding on the message of his order’s patron, Augustine of Hippo, Vermigli went further than Contarini and developed a predestinarian theology of salvation as thoroughgoing as Luther, Bucer or Calvin. Ochino’s followers whitewashed over the frescoes in the Neapolitan church in which they met, not a conventional action for Italian Catholics.5 Among Valdés’s other admirers were talented members of some of Italy’s premier noble families, such as the two poets, artistic patrons and lay theologians Vittoria Colonna and her cousin by marriage Giulia Gonzaga. Gonzaga was a celebrated beauty who, in her widowhood, retired to a Neapolitan convent to become part of the Valdés circle in Naples – indeed, provided the equivalent of a salon for it. The Colonna, an ancient dynasty in Rome, had produced two popes and claimed others as ancient family members – one relative had been Cardinal Prospero Colonna, who in the fifteenth century pioneered investigative archaeology (see pp. 576–7). With such support, Valdés had a ready entry to courts and noble palaces all over Italy. Divergent preoccupations naturally emerged from such a group, yet central was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith, together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace. Associates of the movement were indeed soon characterized as Spirituali, and it is equally possible to acknowledge the leading role of Valdés in their thought and call them Valdesians. They brooded much (like Luther far away in Wittenberg) on the Cross and Passion of Christ, themes which dominated the later art and poetry of Michelangelo, who was a close friend of Vittoria Colonna. Valdés produced two of their key texts: one the so-called Alphabet, the other yet another specimen of a Catechism (they were now proliferating, as Europe argued

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  which were often subsequently ignored: like the Jesuit de Nobili before him (see p. 705), he showed a deep respect for Hindu traditions and tried to avoid presenting Christianity in woodenly Western terms. His resolution to discuss his faith thoughtfully with Muslims and Hindus took precedence for him over seeking rapid conversions. Ziegenbalg’s work aroused the interest of Anglicans: it helped that Queen Anne of England’s husband, Prince George, was Danish, and that the Prince’s chaplain was a friend of Francke’s. In a gesture of ecumenical cooperation rare at the time and not consistently shown later, the Anglican educational Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge sent Ziegenbalg a printer and press to make it possible to publish a pioneering translation of the Bible into Tamil. Alas for his gradualist strategy, he was beset by political troubles in India, and his fragile constitution led to an early death.52 Zinzendorf had his own close connections with the Danish Court, and from the 1730s he made something permanent of Ziegenbalg’s interrupted work. Yet there was a difference from nearly all previous Western missions: the first Moravian missionaries whom he sent out were laypeople, often quite humble and uneducated folk, who tried to earn their livings by their craft skills on mission (see Plate 62). The Count himself personally joined his followers on an extraordinary series of journeys worldwide — to North America and the Caribbean, as well as travels through Europe from France to Britain to Scandinavia. These adventures came close to bankrupting him, and the work had to be rescued by others, but it continued. Moravian missionary work among slaves in the British West Indies and in America proved acceptable to slave owners, as they found that the Moravians taught their converts obedience and made them more hard-working. Moravians sought to improve the welfare of slaves rather than give institutional support to the growing British calls for the abolition of the trade and the institution (see pp. 870–71). Ostentatiously abstaining from involvement in politics, they still managed, in an astute balancing act, to preserve the esteem of British abolitionists. More generally, the Moravians showed other Protestant Churches that missions could be successful and that the initiative was worth imitating. Moravian numerical strength now lies outside their European homeland, thanks to their missionary work worldwide.53 THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL: METHODISM In parallel with the Pietist movement in Germany and enjoying many links with it was a renewal of English-speaking Protestantism which came to be described as the Evangelical Revival.54 In the background were similar concerns to those

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  “Where does Christianity begin? In Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome? How did the early creeds of the church develop and differentiate? What was the impact of the Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation? How have vital Christian communities emerged in Asia, Africa, and India since the eighteenth century? Award-winning historian MacCulloch attempts to answer these questions and many more in this elegantly written, magisterial history of Christianity. … He offers sketches of Christian thinkers from Augustine and Luther to Desmond Tutu. … His monumental achievement will not soon be surpassed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book. MacCulloch is to be congratulated for his accessible handling of so much complex, difficult material. … He keeps the reader engaged with wit and choice anecdotes and throughout the entire book he retains his own distinctive, slightly irreverent perspective, and an unerring instinct for when to go from macro to micro history.” —John Cornwell, Financial Times “A triumphantly executed achievement. This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language.” —Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury “[MacCulloch’s] writing is brilliant, critical, inspiring, humorous.” —Brother Curtis, The Society of Saint John the Evangelist “Excellent … I suspect it will quickly become the go-to book for those seeking information on this major world religion.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s splendid account of Christianity’s long, momentous, non-ignorable life among us is in one way an account of everything that has gone on during the three millennia in which he sets his story. … A well- informed and—bless the man—witty narrative, fluent, well-judged and wholly free of cant. Christianity, the book, is more than informative, more than measured and temperate. It’s enjoyable—a jolly good read.” —The Washington Times “I heartily recommend Christianity to anyone with an interest in the history of the Church. The book is very accessible and readable. Both the novice and the expert should find it profitable. Believers will find challenges which we should be willing to face, and which should be a catalyst for some appropriate soul- searching. Cynics may just find some things that might make them willing to open up a dialog with the Faithful.” —HollywoodJesus.com “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental book is essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it, while those who protest indifference may be ambushed by surprise at its force in world culture over the millenniums.” —Melvyn Bragg, The Observer, choosing Christianity as Book of the Year

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Portuguese). Higher-caste Hindus still tended to ignore him, but his strategy did produce results in establishing his guru status among lower-caste people. The Portuguese authorities fiercely opposed de Nobili, but finally lost their case against him in Rome in 1623; his reports back to Europe in the course of these disputes are among the earliest careful western European accounts of Hinduism and Buddhism. Whatever success the Church had in the Tamil country of south India was entirely thanks to Nobili and his Italian successors, but their work suffered during the eighteenth century both from severe Muslim persecution and, as in South America, from the general suppression of the Society of Jesus.29 Nobili was actually adopting a precedent of his Society from another vast mission field, China. Here, in the face of one of the world’s most powerful empires, Portugal had even less influence than in India.30 The Chinese were not especially interested in large-scale contacts with foreign countries, not even for trade, and with their military might they were certainly not prepared to let the Portuguese in their small trading enclave at Macau adopt the ruthless proselytizing methods of Goa. The Jesuits quickly decided that missionaries must adapt themselves to Chinese customs. This involved much rapid self- education. Their first great missionary, the Italian Matteo Ricci, on his arrival in 1582, adopted the dress of a Buddhist monk (bonze), without realizing that bonzes were despised by the people who mattered.31 When his mistake was pointed out, he and his fellow Jesuits began dressing as Confucian scholars, complete with long beards (see Plate 46); they were determined to show that their learning was worthy of respect in a culture with a deep reverence for scholarship (an ethos of which naturally they greatly approved). In this they had the advantage of the network of colleges and educational experience built up back in Europe in the previous decades. One Portuguese member of the Society in 1647 used a metaphor for a Jesuit college drawn from a more militant mission field: it was ‘a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven, which every year produces conquistadors of souls’. He also commented whimsically that the Jesuits’ long training was reminiscent of the naturalist Pliny’s assertion that baby elephants were carried in their mother’s womb for two years. The purpose of such long gestation both for elephants and for Jesuits was that they would be prepared for battle and strike fear into other creatures.32 The Chinese upper class was indeed impressed by the Jesuits’ knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and geography, and the Society gained an honoured place at the emperor’s court through its specialist use of these skills, even taking charge of reforming the imperial calendar — but not gaining many converts. The Jesuit emphasis on their honoured place at Court was always something of a diversion from the real reasons for the growth of adherents, who were very

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  opposite, and legislate first the British slave trade and then slavery out of existence throughout the growing British Empire. Wilberforce’s campaigning energies and charisma made him the dominant figure in his circle of Evangelical reformers, who gained the nickname ‘the Clapham Sect’ from a village south of London which was then a pleasant rural home to Wilberforce and other wealthy Evangelicals. His struggle was long and bitter, but in 1807 he achieved his first goal. When he and his friends realized that the abolition of the slave trade had not led to the weakening of slavery as they had hoped, they widened their horizons to persuade the British Parliament to cut off the institution at its root. It was only after Wilberforce’s retirement from Parliament that, in 1833, the old man heard his friends had won that second victory, receiving the news just three days before he died. Like Charles Darwin later, the often-reviled reformer was now given national honour by burial in Westminster Abbey.15 The long struggle to abolish slavery remained throughout a curious collaboration of fervent Evangelicals, who were mostly otherwise extremely politically conservative, with radical children of the Enlightenment, many of whom had no great love of Christianity, though some were enthusiastic Unitarians (as Socinians were now more courteously known).16 Such radicals saw an end to slavery as part of the war on oppression of which the French Revolution also formed a part. So in 1791, before that Revolution became a liability rather than a potential ally for English radicals, the adventurous Whig MP Charles James Fox – whose colourful private life certainly did not make him a natural ally for morally censorious Evangelicals – spoke forcefully in Parliament in support of one of Wilberforce’s earlier unsuccessful motions against ‘this shameful trade in human flesh’. ‘Personal freedom,’ he insisted, ‘must be the first object of every human being … a right, of which he who deprives a fellow-creature is absolutely criminal’.17 There has been nearly a century of argument as to whether slavery’s abolition was merely a Machiavellian outcome of the West’s realization that slavery was becoming an economic liability. It is understandable that descendants of enslaved Africans should tire of hearing complacent British repetition of the famous judgement by the Victorian historian of European ethical change, W. E. H. Lecky, that the ‘unwearied, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations’. Yet after all the debate, and the research it engendered, Lecky seems vindicated: abolition was an act of moral revulsion which defied the strict commercial interests of European and anglophone nations.18 Less frequently has it been recognized as one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Christian history: a defiance of biblical certainties,

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “It was an enormously bold decision,” he told an interviewer on film. It was the way he said the word “enormously” that stayed with me. In ways, it sounded like Armstrong thought Apollo 8 to be an even bigger leap for mankind than landing on the Moon. Other astronauts and NASA personnel said as much directly. Several called Apollo 8 the riskiest and most thrilling of all the Apollo missions. Few remembered having dry eyes as Borman, Lovell, and Anders spoke to the world on Christmas Eve as they circled the Moon. All of them—along with billions of others around the world, more than any than had ever listened to a human voice at once—remembered what these three astronauts said. As I pushed deeper into researching Apollo 8, I found another story, one with striking parallels to life in America today. Apollo 8 flew at the end of 1968, one of the most terrible and divisive years in the country’s history. Assassinations, riots, war, and other events split the country and turned neighbor against neighbor, Republican against Democrat, young against old. When Apollo 8 flew at the end of December, it looked like nothing could heal a nation so badly wounded from the inside. Nearly fifty years later, the United States seemed torn apart again. As candidates launched their presidential campaigns in 2015, the country stood divided by a world of political and cultural differences, some of which manifested in violence or ugly public displays. Many people had never seen their country so fractured, their fellow citizens so furious with one another, and it only got worse as the election approached and then a new president was elected. But to those old enough to remember, it all looked so much like 1968. There was one significant difference between 1968 and modern-day America, however. In 1968, there was Apollo 8. When Borman, Lovell, and Anders returned from the Moon, few could argue—no matter their age or political leaning or background—that they hadn’t seen something important and beautiful happen, that these three men had helped the country, and the world, to heal. So far, there has been no Apollo 8 for our time. I knew right away that I wanted to tell the story of Apollo 8. But I also knew that I couldn’t do the story justice without interviewing the three crew members. At the time, Borman and Lovell were 87 years old, Anders was 83. I wasn’t certain that any of them would want to talk to me. I found Lovell’s email address and wrote to him. A few days later, his assistant called and said he would be pleased to meet with me at his office, just a 15-minute drive from my home. When I arrived, Lovell told me that years earlier he’d listened to Shadow Divers as an audiobook and found himself so engrossed he’d circled in the parking lot at his office, unwilling to leave the car until a chapter had ended.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  # Book - Christianity (Notes & Bibliography) # Source: sources/books-inbox/Book - Christianity (Notes & Bibliography).pdf # Extracted via pypdf (ASN-512, 2026-04-22) # Pages: 353 (empty: 2) Praise for Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and surprisingly accessible volume on the subject than MacCulloch’s. This is not a book to be taken lightly. … To me its appeal lies in its illuminating explications of things so apparently obvious that they would seem to require no explanation.” —Jon Meacham, The New York Times Book Review “A tour de force. The most brilliant point of this remarkable book is its identification of the U.S. as the prime example of the kind of nation the reformers hoped to create.” —Paul Johnson, The Spectator “This ambitious project represents the first attempt in decades by a major historian of Christianity—MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church at Oxford—to craft a one-volume narrative of the faith from its origin to the present. … The engaging narrative and incisive analysis for which he is renowned make this work an essential companion for any student of Christianity.” —Commonweal “At a time when quarrels between believers and nonbelievers, new atheists and old faithfuls, dominate so much of our public discourse, Diarmaid MacCulloch has given us the one thing that we most need—not polemic but history, high, wide and lucid, and, given the enormity of his task, often winningly light of touch. Taking as his subject nothing less than the whole history of the faith, he has written a social history that illuminates changes in belief; and a history of belief that helps us see how our society got so much of its structure. … Throughout he achieves a near-perfect match of narrative flair and analytic detail. In the best old-fashioned, classical sense, we are offered here a ‘pageant’ of people and events. … [He] reminds us that history matters.” —Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of Paris to the Moon and judge of the 2010 Cundill Prize in History “He brings an insider’s wit to tracing the fate of official Christianity in an age of doubt, and to addressing modern surges of zeal, from Mormons to Pentecostals.” —The Economist

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  # Book - Christianity (Part 7 - 1492 - Present) # Source: sources/books-inbox/Book - Christianity (Part 7 - 1492 - Present).pdf # Extracted via pypdf (ASN-512, 2026-04-22) # Pages: 251 (empty: 1) Praise for Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch “It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and surprisingly accessible volume on the subject than MacCulloch’s. This is not a book to be taken lightly. … To me its appeal lies in its illuminating explications of things so apparently obvious that they would seem to require no explanation.” —Jon Meacham, The New York Times Book Review “A tour de force. The most brilliant point of this remarkable book is its identification of the U.S. as the prime example of the kind of nation the reformers hoped to create.” —Paul Johnson, The Spectator “This ambitious project represents the first attempt in decades by a major historian of Christianity—MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church at Oxford—to craft a one-volume narrative of the faith from its origin to the present. … The engaging narrative and incisive analysis for which he is renowned make this work an essential companion for any student of Christianity.” —Commonweal “At a time when quarrels between believers and nonbelievers, new atheists and old faithfuls, dominate so much of our public discourse, Diarmaid MacCulloch has given us the one thing that we most need—not polemic but history, high, wide and lucid, and, given the enormity of his task, often winningly light of touch. Taking as his subject nothing less than the whole history of the faith, he has written a social history that illuminates changes in belief; and a history of belief that helps us see how our society got so much of its structure. … Throughout he achieves a near-perfect match of narrative flair and analytic detail. In the best old-fashioned, classical sense, we are offered here a ‘pageant’ of people and events. … [He] reminds us that history matters.” —Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of Paris to the Moon and judge of the 2010 Cundill Prize in History “He brings an insider’s wit to tracing the fate of official Christianity in an age of doubt, and to addressing modern surges of zeal, from Mormons to Pentecostals.” —The Economist

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven different terraces on the way down.” A few minutes later, the spacecraft passed over one of the sites NASA had identified as a potential landing area for future missions. “It’s very easy to spot,” Lovell said. “You can see the entire rims of the craters from here with, of course, the white crescent on the far side where the Sun is shining on it.” A few seconds later, Borman jumped in. He still couldn’t believe the accuracy with which planners had calculated the flight. “Houston, for your information, we lost radio contact at the exact second you predicted. Are you sure you didn’t turn off the transmitters at that time?” “Honest injun, we didn’t,” Carr replied. “While these other guys are all looking at the Moon, I want to make sure we got a good SPS,” Borman said. Without the properly functioning SPS engine, Borman knew, Apollo 8 could never leave lunar orbit. “And we want a Go for every rev, please,” Borman added. “Otherwise, we’ll burn in TEI-1 at your direction.” It was the request of a conservative commander. Before every new orbit, Borman wanted Houston to confirm that everything—the spacecraft, its systems, its computers—was working well. If not, he was prepared to fire his engine, leave lunar orbit, and head home—Trans Earth Injection, or TEI—at the first opportunity. In Borman’s voice, even from a distance of a quarter million miles, Kraft could hear he had the right commander on board. Apollo 8 continued flying, more and more nose-first, over the near side of the Moon. Inside, Anders kept his still and movie cameras firing, trying to record as much of the lunar surface as possible, all according to the photographic plan provided by Houston. Aiming and focusing weren’t easy. The center window had been fogged by sealant fumes. Framing panoramas from the small rendezvous window was like trying to look out over the Grand Canyon through a welder’s helmet. And when Anders did lock on to something good, he might have to interrupt the moment to change lenses or swap out film magazines. Still, as the Moon moved under the spacecraft, Anders began to capture spectacular shots, hundreds of close-up answers to questions that had endured for millennia. Lighting conditions stayed good for another few minutes before Apollo 8 flew into darkness. (Generally, the crew would have about an hour of good lighting for photography during each two-hour orbit.) Forty minutes later, the ship slipped around to the lunar far side, where it again lost contact with Earth. Apollo 8 had made its first full revolution; when they next came around, they would be making their first TV broadcast from the Moon. It would be an early morning telecast in the United States, but millions would be watching and listening, there and all over the world. At home, the astronauts’ wives gathered their children in front of their television sets.