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Product Description ------------------- 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 ------ 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 P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); About the Actor --------------- 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. See more ( javascript:void(0) )