The New York Times bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization reveals how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. • “Cahill is our king of popular historians.” —The Dallas Morning News This was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courage, as thousands refused to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. In these exquisitely written and lavishly illustrated pages, Cahill illuminates, as no one else can, the great gift-givers who shaped our history—those who left us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

With growing popular interest because of television, movies, and books, unbelieving historians are teaching that the early church was filled with "lost scriptures", "church conspiracies," and even radical changes to the Bible itself. Most Christians have no idea how to respond to the questions they raise. This unique resource gives you a crash course on the most important people, events, and ideas of the earliest Christians following the New Testament period. In its pages, you'll discover what every believer should know about the early church ... and why.

A magisterial cultural history, this book tells the story of the sixties revolution for freedom, self-expression, and high ideals--as it occurred not in the streets, but in business. Through a series of compelling stories, most never before told, Kleiner introduces readers to the visionary people who believed passionately that corporations could be the center not only of power, but of truth, freedom, and equality.

It was a tumultuous time, filled with heroes, heretics, and some who were a little bit of both. It was a time of destruction and rebuilding. Some sincerely sought reform while others sought merely to profit by it, and some--perhaps too few--used the events of the time to become saints.

A lively examination of the heretics who helped Christianity become the world’s most powerful religion. From Arius, a fourth-century Libyan cleric who doubted the very divinity of Christ, to more successful heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, this book charts the history of dissent in the Christian Church. As the author traces the Church’s attempts at enforcing orthodoxy, from the days of Constantine to the modern Catholic Church’s lingering conflicts, he argues that heresy—by forcing the Church to continually refine and impose its beliefs—actually helped Christianity to blossom into one of the world’s most formidable religions. Today, all believers owe it to themselves to grapple with the questions raised by heresy. Can you be a Christian without denouncing heretics? Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become as popular as Luther’s once-outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and a priesthood of all believers? A delightfully readable and deeply learned new history, Heretics overturns our assumptions about the role of heresy in a faith that still shapes the world. “Wright emphasizes the ‘extraordinarily creative role’ that heresy has played in the evolution of Christianity by helping to ‘define, enliven, and complicate’ it in dialectical fashion. Among the world’s great religions, Christianity has been uniquely rich in dissent, Wright argues—especially in its early days, when there was so little agreement among its adherents that one critic compared them to a marsh full of frogs croaking in discord.” —The New Yorker

Orthodox science -- particularly in the medical profession -- has for centuries resisted change. It traces back at least as far as Socrates who was done to death for corrupting youth with his innovative ideas. In recent times, practically all the great advances in medicine have been made against a powerfully entrenched orthodoxy. Wayne Martin's book is about some of the men involved -- then and now: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who made physicians wash their hands; Louis Pasteur, who postulated the connection between bacteria and certain diseases; Frederick Banting, who discovered insulin; Jonas Salk, who solved the mystery of polio, to mention but a few. These men all braved the wrath of the medical establishment of their day. Heretics they were, but Heroes they became. Similarly, today a group of brave pioneers are fighting the same fight. They are, says the author, the heroes of tomorrow: Ernst Krebs, Jr., Evan Shute, Dean Burk, Denis Burkitt, Virginia Livingston and a dozen others, all of whose careers and findings are described here by a man who has pursued his topic for the past ten years.