Rodney Stark

In God's Battalions, award-winning author Rodney Stark takes on the long-held view that the Crusades were the first round of European colonialism, conducted for land, loot, and converts by barbarian Christians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. Instead, Stark argues that the Crusades were the first military response to Muslim terrorist aggession.

"Religious historian and sociologist Rodney Stark has spent his career engaging with that very question. Indeed, after thirty highly regarded books on the matter, he has created a true master course in Christian history. Now, for the first time, he distills his research to just the most important and interesting episodes--the seminal moments in the story that, he now believes, demand new perspectives. Stark gets right to the events of greatest interest,...

Finally, the Truth about the Rise of the West Modernity developed only in the West-in Europe and North America. Nowhere else did science and democracy arise; nowhere else was slavery outlawed. Only Westerners invented chimneys, musical scores, telescopes, eyeglasses, pianos, electric lights, aspirin, and soap. The question is, Why? Unfortunately, that question has become so politically incorrect that most scholars avoid it. But acclaimed author Rodney...

The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilization. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that addresses beliefs as well as historical facts, Rodney Stark brings a sociologist's perspective to bear on the...

"As we all know and as many of our well established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history, Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called "Hitler's Pope," the Dark Ages were a stunting of the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment, and the religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for...

¿Cómo fue posible la expansión de un pequeño movimiento mesiánico nacido en los confines del Imperio romano, hasta llegar a convertirse en la religión dominante de la civilización occidental? En contra de una visión arraigada, la perspectiva sociológica es capaz demostrar que el cristianismo no surgió como un movimiento clandestino de los desposeídos del Imperio y que su notable crecimiento no fue debido a súbitas conversiones masivas....