The Christians V10 – We the People

Description

We The People

Volume 10: A.D. 1600 to 1800
Democracy: Christendom’s unintended achievement

The Reformation era ended with the Thirty Years’ War, a civil struggle that devastated most of Germany and much of central Europe. That catastrophe, with a parallel civil war in Britain, demonstrated the impossibility of forcing religious belief on human beings. The idea now slowly developed of religious tolerance under a secular state. That strange concept – central to the new era known as the Enlightenment – would find its first and in many ways finest form in a new nation, born in rebellion and experimentation, across the seas: the United States of America.

(Click on the image below to view a reduced resolution sample chapter drawn from the book so you get a sense of its writing style.)

Chapter One

A Christian convulsion that cost eight million lives and achieved nothing

• The case of the Catholic Puritan
• The Pied Piper of France’s courtly ladies

Chapter Two

A fight for power pits king against Parliament, and Charles I perishes

• The fifty-year flop of a literary jewel
• Reason and faith, united in verse
• As all went dark, he saw the light

Chapter Three

Mighty Cromwell fails, and so do the Stuarts, but Parliament prevails

• The idea behind two revolutions
• A book that astonished the world

Chapter Four

American democracy: the unintended destiny of the Founding Fathers

• The night they wiped out Deerfield
• The ethnic cleansing of French Acadia
• The grim fate of the Black Robe vision

Chapter Five

A tyrannous reform paves Russia’s way to a state-run church

• The devastation of the Jesuits
• Orthodoxy’s renegade defenders

Chapter Six

Its walls are smashed, the Turks pouring in, but Vienna is saved

• The man who was France

Chapter Seven

The riveting preacher who brought to Christ men with dirty faces

Chapter Eight

How thirteen colonies created a nation that no one quite foresaw

• The clause invoed to silence faith
• The transatlantic trade in people

Chapter Nine

Skeptics fight the faith, but the faithful reply in hymns and oratorios

Chapter Ten

With Islam thwarted, Christendom now faces a new foe from within

• Does nature point the way to God?