A couple of weeks ago I finished reading We Look For A Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians by Carl J. Sommer. The scope is from AD 100 to 313 in the Roman world, during a period of intense persecution, right up to the legalisation of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine.
The first section on what the Roman world was like at the time was a wonderful lead in to the whole book. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to have a good idea of what the lives of the early Christians were like. It made me think about the real lack of accessible historical books on that period, which makes it almost seem like that period of history didn't exist. I say this because as a child, I loved reading history. I think I managed to read every child's history book in our local library before moving on the adults books at age 8. And I never came across any history book that went into the lives of the early Christians.
After reading the book, I've started reading Augustus Ceasar's World to my kids during their history lesson, as I feel that really knowing this period of history from the death of Julius Caesar onwards is vital for any Christian child of the West. This way they'll know more about that period than I did at their ages and therefore be immune from being mislead by much of the anti-Catholic (and anti-Christian) propaganda that I fell prey to when reading history in my teens.
The first section on what the Roman world was like at the time was a wonderful lead in to the whole book. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to have a good idea of what the lives of the early Christians were like. It made me think about the real lack of accessible historical books on that period, which makes it almost seem like that period of history didn't exist. I say this because as a child, I loved reading history. I think I managed to read every child's history book in our local library before moving on the adults books at age 8. And I never came across any history book that went into the lives of the early Christians.
After reading the book, I've started reading Augustus Ceasar's World to my kids during their history lesson, as I feel that really knowing this period of history from the death of Julius Caesar onwards is vital for any Christian child of the West. This way they'll know more about that period than I did at their ages and therefore be immune from being mislead by much of the anti-Catholic (and anti-Christian) propaganda that I fell prey to when reading history in my teens.
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