John Funnell

“In addition, local authorities were ordered to seize each Christian man, to pluck out his beard and to tattoo a black mark on his shoulder. When few Christians defected in response to these measures, the Khān then ordered that all Christian men be castrated and have one eye put out—which caused many deaths in this era before antibiotics, but did lead to many conversions.37”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, “to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was ‘dark’ must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant.”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“Women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led.”
― Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

“I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.35”
― Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis