Includes bibliographical references (pages 761-767) and index.

"Moynahan traces the extraordinary journey that Christianity has made from its start as a small and vulnerable sect - "They were crucified or set on fire," Tacitus wrote of Christians, in Nero's Rome, "so that when darkness came they burned like torches in the night"--To the world's greatest congregation of almost two billion baptized souls. The Faith opens with the story of Jesus himself, the Resurrection, and the spreading of the Gospels. It shows how the young religion's growing power in the East, the cradle of its early monks and philosophers, was broken by the Islamic conquests, and how its energies were redirected westward into barbarian Europe. Moynahan covers in lucid detail the intensity of the medieval faith, with its titanic cathedrals, its clashes between Islam and Christendom, and its fracture into Reformation, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the religious dissent that drove settlers to seek religious freedom in the Americas." "Based on little-known primary sources (including early Arabic writings), and featuring more than one hundred photographs and illustrations, this extraordinary history will be of interest to Christians of all denominations, to historians, and to every reader who seeks a fuller understanding of a force that has shaped the modern world."--Jacket

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