Days after his prime minister was assassinated in the middle of Rome in November 1848, Pope Pius IX found himself a virtual prisoner in his own palace. Only two years earlier Pius's election had triggered a wave of optimism across Italy: he was seen as a youthful, benevolent new pope who would at last bring the Papal States into modern times and help create a new, unified Italian nation. Kertzer documents the story of the violent revolution that signaled...

"Christians have lived in Palestine since the earliest days of the Jesus movement, yet they are often unheard and ignored in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With both lament and hope, Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac offers a theology of the land and a vision for a shared land that belongs to God, where there are no second-class citizens of any kind"--

Sisters is the first major history of the pivotal role played by nuns in the building of American society. Nuns were the first feminists, argues Fialka. They became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. In the 1800s nuns moved west with the frontier, often starting the first hospitals and schools in immigrant...

"From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture wars Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control--sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid...

"People Get Ready tells the stories of twelve twentieth-century activists whose faith led them to speak prophetically and work peacefully toward social justice for the marginalized"--

"For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they began the most notorious period of conflict between the two religions. Depending on who you ask, the fall of the holy city was either an inspiring legend or the greatest of horrors. In Crusaders, Dan Jones interrogates the many sides of the larger story, charting a deeply human...

"A bold new history of the rise of Christianity, showing how its radical followers ravaged vast swathes of classical culture, plunging the world into an era of intellectual darkness. In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town's main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long...

"Explores the life of Jesus and the movement he started, challenging familiar assumptions and conventional notions about the origins of Christianity. Drawing upon new and sometimes controversial historical evidence and interviews with the nation's leading New Testament scholars ... the film traces Jesus' life, focusing on the events that occurred after he died and on his first followers"--Container.