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The role of personal prayer, worship in common, everyday work, and Christian service is treated in simple, almost biblical, words. Life Together is bread for all who are hungry for the real life of Christian fellowship.

From 1846 to the present day, the Vatican has maintained quite the same message brought forth from Heaven by different messengers across time and across vast distances and continents. This message echoes the gravest of admonitions and calls mankind to convert and find refuge through the knowledge of the truth, which today threatens the very basis of world peace...

"Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature," writes Bart Ehrman, "is the degree to which it was forged." The Homilies and Recognitions of Clement; Paul's letters to and from Seneca; Gospels by Peter, Thomas, and Philip; Jesus' correspondence with Abgar, letters by Peter and Paul in the New Testament - all forgeries. To cite just a few examples.

For many, the medieval world seems dark and foreign - a miraculous, brutal, and irrational time of superstition and strange relics. The pursuit of heretics, the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the domination of the "Holy Land" come to mind.

While most people think that the 27 books of the New Testament are the only sacred writings of the early Christians, this is not at all the case. A companion volume to Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities, this book offers an anthology of up-to-date and easy-listening translations of many noncanonical writings from the first centuries after Christ - texts that have been for the most part lost or neglected for almost two millennia.

As a boy, Jesus was a refugee, an outsider, an immigrant in Galilee in which he grew up, and affected by horrific atrocities by the occupying Roman overlords. All this and more is explored in this scholarly but highly accessible investigation into the world of Jesus, ranging from his birth to his coming of age and beyond. Joan Taylor, a world authority on the history and literature of the first century CE, draws both on the latest archaeological findings and on the historical clues to be found within ancient texts of the period.

This runaway best seller shows both the basic logic of the Enneagram and its harmony with the core truths of Christian thought from the time of the early Church forward. Experience author Richard Rohr's expertise and advanced thought on the subject, easily laid out for all audiences.

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) is one of the most beloved of the Catholic saints. In 1562, during the era of the Spanish Inquisition, Teresa sat down to write an account of the mystical experiences for which she had become famous. The result was this book, one of the great classics of spiritual autobiography. With this fresh translation of The Book of My Life, Mirabai Starr brings the inimitable Spanish mystic to life for a new generation, with contemporary English that mirrors Teresa's own earthy, vernacular Spanish, and that presents us with someone we feel we know.

In exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Heather shows how Christendom constantly battled against both so-called 'heresies' and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction, to the astonishing revolution in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation.

We all need inspiration to lead lives that honor God. When our faith is weak or the pressures of the world seem overwhelming, remembering the great men and women of the past can inspire us to renewed strength and purpose. Our spiritual struggles are not new, and the stories of those who have gone before can help lead the way to our own victories.

In a book that took eight years to research and write, leading Bible scholar Bart D. Ehrman explores how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty Creator of all things.

This fundamental historical question and its complex answer speak penetratingly to the spiritual impulses, concerns, and beliefs that have played a seminal role in our world, even as they reveal the foundation of history’s most global religious movement, and fresh insights into the Western world's single most influential human being. Tackling all of these matters and more, Great Courses favorite Professor Ehrman returns with the unprecedented historical inquiry of How Jesus Became God.

As we all know, and as many of our well-established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history, Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called "Hitler's Pope", the Dark Ages were a stunting of the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment, and the religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power. But what if these long-held beliefs were all wrong?

The understandable, deeply authoritative and bestselling book on the Orthodox Church, in a fully updated and revised Third Edition.

The Two Babylons is a religious pamphlet published in 1853 by the Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland theologian Alexander Hislop. The author argues that the Catholic Church is the Babylon of the Apocalypse which is described in the Bible. The work examines the symbolism of the Book of Revelation in detail.

This book presents the life, thought, and work of Marcion in its historical, theological, ethical, and liturgical contexts. It distinguishes itself from its competitors by employing a new method: rigorously critiquing heresy reports by means of the testimony of Marcion's own scriptures. It devotes attention to the reliable reconstruction of those scriptures, arguing for the chronological priority of Marcion's Gospel over what is now known as canonical Luke.

Malleus is Latin for “hammer,” Maleficarum is Latin for “of witches.” Thus, the title tells you everything that is to come. Heinrich Kramer is attempting to forge a hammer made of paper and ink, and to bring it down upon the heads of those he believes to be practising witchcraft. Heinrich was a Dominican Inquisitor traipsing around Germany in the 1480s, hunting for witches.

In Defenders of the West, the author of Sword and Scimitar follows up with vivid and dramatic profiles of eight extraordinary warriors—some saints, some sinners—who defended the Christian West against Islamic invasions. Discover the real Count Dracula, Spain’s El Cid, England’s Richard Lionheart, and many other historical figures whose true and original claim to fame revolved around their defiant stance against jihadist aggression.

The earliest Christians believed Jesus was an ancient celestial being who put on a bodysuit of flesh, died at the hands of dark forces, and then rose from the dead and ascended back into the heavens. But the writing we have today from that first generation of Christians never says where they thought he landed, where he lived, or where he died. The idea that Jesus toured Galilee and visited Jerusalem arose only a lifetime later, in unsourced legends written in a foreign land and language. Many sources repeat those legends, but none corroborate them.

Whether you're an avid student of the Bible or a skeptic of its relevance, The Book That Made Your World will transform your perception of its influence on virtually every facet of Western civilization. Vishal Mangalwadi reveals the personal motivation that fueled his own study of the Bible. Learn how the Bible transformed the social, political, and religious institutions that have sustained Western culture for the past millennium, and discover how secular corruption endangers the stability and longevity of Western civilization.