Rodney Stark

Cities of God

The Real Story of How Christianity Became and Urban Movement and Conquered Rome

Talking Points

RODNEY STARK is professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. His twenty-six books on the history and sociology of religion include The Rise of Christianity; One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism; For the Glory of God, which won the 2004 award of merit for history/biography from Christianity Today; and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success.

Description

Since early Christianity was primarily an urban movement, the thirty-one cities of the empire having populations of at least 30,000 as of the year 100 serve as the basis for testing hypotheses about the early church.