Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.

Keith explores the complex position of the Catholic Church in modern Vietnamese history. Much like the revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation the revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life polarized the place of the new Church in post-colonial Vietnamese politics and society.

How did the Irish stay Irish? Why are Irish and Catholic still so often synonymous in the English-speaking world? Ireland's Empire is the first book to examine the complex relationship between Irish migrants and Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century on a truly global basis. Drawing on more than 100 archives on five continents, Colin Barr traces the spread of Irish Roman Catholicism across the English-speaking world and explains how the Catholic Church became the vehicle for Irish diasporic identity in the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and India between 1829 and 1914. The world these Irish Catholic bishops, priests, nuns, and laity created endured long into the twentieth century, and its legacy is still present today.

Presents a radical new reading of how Christian history was rewritten in the fourth century to suit its circumstances under Rome.

The Spanish cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas is a key figure in the history of Spain’s conquest of the Americas. Las Casas condemned the torture and murder of natives by the conquistadores in reports to the Spanish royal court and in tracts such as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). For his unrelenting denunciation of the colonialists’ atrocities, Las Casas has been revered as a noble protector of the Indians and as a pioneering anti-imperialist. He has become a larger-than-life figure invoked by generations of anticolonialists in Europe and Latin America. Separating historical reality from myth, Daniel Castro provides a nuanced, revisionist assessment of the friar’s career, writings, and political activities. Castro argues that Las Casas was very much an imperialist. Intent on converting the Indians to Christianity, the religion of the colonizers, Las Casas simply offered the natives another face of empire: a paternalistic, ecclesiastical imperialism. Castro contends that while the friar was a skilled political manipulator, influential at what was arguably the world’s most powerful sixteenth-century imperial court, his advocacy on behalf of the natives had little impact on their lives. Analyzing Las Casas’s extensive writings, Castro points out that in his many years in the Americas, Las Casas spent very little time among the indigenous people he professed to love, and he made virtually no effort to learn their languages. He saw himself as an emissary from a superior culture with a divine mandate to impose a set of ideas and beliefs on the colonized. He differed from his compatriots primarily in his antipathy to violence as the means for achieving conversion.

Winner of a 2020 Catholic Press Association book award (first place, best new religious book series). Suspense, politics, sin, death, sex, and redemption: Not the plot of the latest crime novel, but elements of the true history of the Catholic Church. Larger-than-life saints such as Athanasius of Alexandria, Jerome, Augustine, and political figures such as Emperor Constantine played an important part in the history of the Christianity. In The Church and the Roman Empire (301–490): Constantine, Councils, and the Fall of Rome, popular Catholic author Mike Aquilina gives readers a vivid and engaging account of how Christianity developed and expanded as the Roman Empire declined. In The Church and the Roman Empire (301–490), Mike Aquilina explores the dramatic backstory of the Council of Nicaea and why Christian unity and belief are still expressed by the Nicene Creed. He also sets the record straight about commonly held misconceptions about the Catholic Church. Readers may be surprised to learn: The Edict of Milan didn’t just legalize Christianity; it also established religious tolerance for all faiths for the first time in history. The growth of Christianity inspired a more merciful society: Crucifixion was abolished; the practice of throwing prisoners to wild beasts for entertainment was outlawed; and slave owners were punished for killing their slaves. Controversy between Arians and Catholics may have resulted in building more hospitals and other networks of charitable assistance to the poor. When Rome fell, not many people at the time noticed. Aquilina brings Church history to life in The Church and the Roman Empire, enabling Catholics to more deeply consider the true origins of the creed that unites us, the Bible we read, and the liturgy we celebrate.

From the chaos of the Tower of Babel to the tragedy of the Babylonian captivity, Empires of the Bible tells the story of the ancient civilizations in the Old Testament. Using research conducted in Babylon and Egypt, this book includes many valuable and historical records inscribed in stone by the very men living in those ancient times. These records combined with Bible history of the same, are woven together in one connected story. Reprinted exactly from the 1904 original, this book also includes a series of 21 maps which trace the course of those empires. The unique design of this book will be found useful by every student, either of the Bible or history.

Drawing upon the experiences of Scottish and Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Newfoundland, and Trinidad, Empire and Emancipation sheds important new light on the complex relationship between Catholicism and the British Empire.