Quotes from Diarmaid MacCulloch

The only way in which Darwin's data made sense was to suppose that species battled for survival, and that evolution came when one slight adaptation of a species proved more successful than another in the battle: a process which he named 'natural selection'. There was nothing benevolent about the providence which watched over the process. Reason was served her notice as the handmaid of Christian revelation.

I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity

Calvin had a talent for inventing abusive nicknames and he styled this amorphous opposition 'Libertines', which had a conveniently scandalous resonance, while also reflecting the undoubted fact that his opponents sought a freedom for which he saw no need.

There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

In Italy, the Index's ban was enforced. Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics; even literary versions of scriptural stories in drama or poetry were frowned on. As a result, between 1567 and 1773, not a single edition of an Italian-language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula.

One should nevertheless not fall into the old stereotype of an organization that kept its place in Spanish society by sheer terror. Certainly the Inquisition used torture and executed some of its victims, but so did nearly all legal systems in Europe at the time, and it is possible to argue that the Spanish Inquisition was less bloodthirsty than most – as we will see, it showed a healthy scepticism about witches and put a stop to witch-persecution where it could

Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.105 There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work.

Yet so much of the story so far has not been about unbelief at all, but sincere and troubled belief. When children of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the children of the Jewish Diaspora turned on the religions which had bred them, they mostly sought not to abolish God but to see him in a clearer light. ( p698)

The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent.

There is now general agreement among historians that between 1400 and 1800, between forty and fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial north America on charges of witchcraft

Henry VII's victory at Bosworth Field was one of the most astonishing political reverses in English history, the culmination of long-term plotting spearheaded by his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the most successful politician in fifteenth-century England.

Now its most ardent defenders are to be found amid the multiple Protestantisms which British emigration has bequeathed to the USA. Some of them, 'King James Only' folk, believe that it possesses an extra dose of the Holy Spirit not granted to any other English version, which is very generous of them, considering that it was commissioned by a monarch whose jovial bisexuality would cause them apoplexy at the present day.

menace, that he intended to 'be present as a spectator and

J.R. Dupuche, 'Sufism and Hesychasm', in B. Neil, G. D. Dunn and L. Cross (eds.), Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church III: Liturgy and Life (Strathfield, NSW, 2003), 335–43.

The earliest biography of Cranmer, probably conceived within a few hours of his death, began the villain narrative: Bishop Cranmer's Recantacyons by Cardinal Pole's Archdeacon of Canterbury and diocesan official Nicholas Harpsfield. 1 Written in Latin for an international audience, it effectively invents a new genre, anti-martyrology: