Christianity in the later Middle Ages was flourishing, popular and vibrant and the institutional church was generally popular - in stark contrast to the picture of corruption and decline painted by the later Reformers which persists even today. Norman Tanner, the pre-eminent historian of the later medieval church, provides a rich and authoritative history of religion in this pivotal period. Despite signs of turbulence and demands for reform, he demonstrates that the church remained powerful, self-confident and deeply rooted. Weaving together key themes of religious history - the Christian roots of Europe; the crusades; the problematic question of the Inquisition; the relationship between the church and secular state; the central role of monasticism; and, the independence of the English church - "The Ages of Faith" is an impressive tribute to a lifetime's research into this subject. But to many readers the central fascination of "The Ages of Faith" will be its perceptive insights into popular and individual spiritual experience: sin, piety, penance, heresy, the role of the mystics and even 'making merry'. "The Ages of Faith" is a major contribution to the Reformation debate and offers a revealing vision of individual and popular religion in an important period so long obscured by the drama of the Reformation.

This book carefully examines the claims made by the followers and promoters of both atheism and religion in a rational and engaging way.

The Story of Civilization, Volume IV: A history of medieval civilization—Christian, Islamic, and Judaic—from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300. This is the fourth volume of the classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning series.

My wife and I love our sons unconditionally and equally. Talking with one of them about his atheism has brought me to a new dimension in my relationship with him, to a review of my own christian beliefs, to a more critical examination of the church, and to a different understanding of ministry in today's world. As personal as I make this all sound, my family represents a thousand families, a hundred thousand and more, who have sat in painful silence because religious differences have taken away their voice. They tire of confrontation, angry discussions, verse hurling and jabbing one another with theories over every conceivable divisive issue. It is a powerful idea that those who do not share our faith should know that we do, not so much in our argument as in our love. It is time to listen.

The loss or disaffiliation of young adults is a much-discussed topic in churches today. Many faith-formation programs focus on keeping the young, believing the youthful spirit will save the church. But do these programs have more to do with an obsession with youthfulness than with helping young people encounter the living God? Questioning the search for new or improved faith-formation programs, leading practical theologian Andrew Root offers an alternative take on the issue of youth drifting away from the church and articulates how faith can be formed in our secular age. He offers a theology of faith constructed from a rich cultural conversation, providing a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the "nones" and "moralistic therapeutic deism." Root helps readers understand why forming faith is so hard in our context and shows that what we have lost is not the ability to keep people connected to our churches but an imagination for how and where God could be present in their lives. He considers what faith is and what steps we can take to move into it, exploring a Pauline concept of faith as encounter with divine action.

Our global community desperately needs overt awakening to an age of reason and faith. Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age meets this need by interpreting faith not in terms of belief in propositions but in terms of living surrender to having been seized by agape for every Face, including one's own. Virtually all faith traditions, from Buddhism to Humanism to Wiccan, are rooted in agape and therefore share considerable spiritual and ethical common ground (a truth long veiled). In contrast to ethically feckless secular rationality--over which a devastating, global social Darwinism currently runs roughshod--faith qua living surrender to agape grounds moral realism, awakens us to love for all creatures, and inspires struggles for justice. Inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Christian spirituality, Greenway engages, on the one hand, intellectuals like Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, and, on the other, contemporary debates over consciousness, free will, evil, and metaethics. He details the character of secular rationality's devastating scission from moral reality and clarifies the promise of understanding faith and spirituality in terms of agape.

Law and Faith in a Sceptical Age is an analysis of the legal position of religious believers in a dominantly secular society. Great Britain is a society based upon broadly liberal principles. It claims to recognise the needs of religious believers and to protect them from discrimination. But whilst its secular ideology pervades public discourse, the vestigial remains of a Christian, Protestant past are seen in things as varied as the structure of public holidays and the continued existence of established churches in both England and Scotland. Religious, Christian values also form the starting point for legal rules relating to matters such as marriage. Active religious communities constitute a very small minority of the population; however, those who belong to them often see their religion as being the most important element of their identity. Yet the world-view of these communities is frequently at odds with both the prevailing liberal, secular climate of Great Britain and its Christian, Anglican past. This necessarily entails a clash of ideologies that puts in question the secular majority's claim to want to protect religious minorities, the possibility of it being able to sufficiently understand the needs of those minorities and the desirability or practicality of any accommodation between the needs of the various religious communities and the secular mainstream of society. Law and Faith in a Sceptical Age addresses these issues by raising the question of whether a liberal, secular state can protect religion. Accommodation to different religious traditions forms part of the history of the legal systems of Britain. This book asks whether further accommodation can and should be made.

An exploration of the tension between two opposing views of the meaning of faith held by Catholics around the world.