The problem with any such movement when it becomes popular is that it can become as much a fashion as a vocation, and attract persons not really suited to the life.

Christians soon discovered that they had many significant disagreements among themselves regarding many of the most basic elements of their faith.

Meister Eckhart was both a brilliant speculative theologian and a majestically gifted writer. He was also given to expressing his more difficult ideas in almost willfully audacious language.

The tears of Peter were therefore indicative of a profound shift in moral imagination and sensibility. Something had become visible that had formerly been hidden from sight. For Christian thought, God had chosen to reveal himself among the least of men and women, and to exalt them to the dignity of his own sons and daughters. And, as a consequence,

The idea of a ‘holy war’ is alien to Christian theological tradition. It is self-evidently incompatible with the recorded teachings of Christ, and would have been abhorrent to the mind of the ancient Church.

For Freud, the self is – rather than a soul with an eternal nature – a complex amalgam of biological and social impulses, many of them quite ‘Darwinian’ in their primal mechanisms, and the conscious mind is only the surface of the ‘unconscious’, where hidden, largely irrational impulses, repressed desires,

The great institutional renewal of the Roman Church, though, began when Pope Paul III (1468–1549) convoked the Council of Trent in 1545. This council continued (with occasional interruptions) under a number of popes until 1563. It instituted a massive reform and regularization of the Western liturgy, dealt systematically with a number of clerical a

If Christianity today is the religion growing most rapidly and most widely throughout the world, it is also – not coincidentally – the most persecuted religion in the world.

when the revolt began, Luther nevertheless exhorted the peasants to desist from rebellion; and when they did not, he wrote a scorching tract – ‘Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants’ – in which he encouraged the legal authorities to slaughter the rebels without pity.