Thinking Christian

1. Tom Gilson wrote:

   March 13, 2009 at 6:05 am   Link

   Just a couple comments on this. I like it a lot for a quick overview of religious history. By its brevity in must distort, obviously. It presents geographically the dominant nominal religions covering the world over time, so perhaps it’s better seen as a map of religious culture than religious belief. It ought to have a separate color for secularism and show that growing in Australia, Europe, and parts of North America recently, though of course cultural Christianity still dominates in those places. It fails to show the growth of Christianity in parts of India, and that as many as 8-10% of China’s people are followers of Christ.

   Quite helpfully it shows that the first Muslim-Christian battles were not the Crusades, and that infamous though they were, they didn’t actually conquer any land or people, as the Muslims had done in their acts of military aggression before.
2. Doug Peters wrote:

   March 13, 2009 at 6:46 am   Link

   Recommended reading: “The Lost History of Christianity” is a good remedy for the distortions — as late as 1300, fully one third of the world’s Christian population was outside of Europe!
3. Tony Hoffman wrote:

   March 14, 2009 at 8:12 pm   Link

   Tom,

   Quite helpfully it shows that the first Muslim-Christian battles were not the Crusades, and that infamous though they were, they didn’t actually conquer any land or people, as the Muslims had done in their acts of military aggression before.

   The Crusades conquered land and people. The 1st Crusade infamously slaughtered the inhabitants of Jerusalem (I’d call that conquering), and throughout the Crusades various other cities were taken, lost, and retaken again before the Crusaders were kicked out for good. (Antioch comes to mind, among others — Jerusalem was important as a religious symbol, but greater wealth was found in taking and holding other locales. Keep in mind that a standard historical interpretation of the Crusades gives great weight to the political / economic interests of talented and ambitious men who, often through their failure to be the first born, went to the Middle East in search for the fiefdoms they could not acquire in Europe.)

   I did like the map, though. It reminded me a powerpoint my brother sent me that showed the second world war in a similar way, and piqued my curiosity with events like an amphibious invasion of southern France (far, far away from Normandy) in 1944.

   And, of course, who can’t think of playing a game of Risk now.

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