St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome. You can tell something about a company by its headquarters building. Before it was a global empire, with all the architectural flourishes of the Roman Empire, Christianity was an eccentric local cult practiced by poor people throughout North Africa and West Asia. How a local religious startup grew into an incorporated global juggernaut, a “branch of the Roman state,” as one scholar puts it, is a story told in Episode 70.
Our History
Like rock climbers scaling a big wall, Josh and Chris take on the towering crag of higher education. Josh finds perspective on this adventure in tackling a monumental read, Peter Heather’s Christendom, a story of how paradise was lost in the orthodoxies and power drive of the hulking monolith known as the Roman Catholic Church. Wary of such heights, Chris stays closer to ground and belays the discussion, releasing the climber’s narrative rope with the story of David Walker’s Appeal, a saga from the early days of the radical freedom movement. In this episode, tall tales that might otherwise leave you lost in the thin alpine air, are safely and expertly scaled by your sure handed HAG guides, who promise to meet you at the summit of historical insight.
Click to hear A Story Told
Sources Referenced and Items of Interest
Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300_(2023)
David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal…to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829)
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“and that the white Americans having reduced us to the wretched state of slavery, treat us in that condition more cruel (they being an enlightened and Christian people), than any heathen nation did any people whom it had reduced to our condition.”
David Walker, Walker’s Appeal (1829)
History Against the Grain 