“Cahill’s third offering [in ‘The Hinges of History’ series] is, if anything, bolder and more engaging than his previous books.… Cahill strips away the pious accretions of 2000 years so that a picture of Jesus as an actual human being emerges.”
—BookPage
“Single-handedly reinventing the craft of intellectual history, Cahill struggles ‘to make the stick figures of the distant past into flesh-and-blood people with real feelings.’ … Cahill’s Jesus is both unpretentiously down to earth and breathtakingly otherworldly. Instead of a pleasant plaster of Paris divinity, Jesus is a religious radical who comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable and confounds all expectations.”
—Religion News Service
“Cahill … has thought vigorously about Jesus.… He is clear and consistent … but deeply personal.… Cahill relies on an excellent group of New Testament scholars.”
—Christian Century
“[Cahill is] a marvelous storyteller who makes Jesus and those who wrote about him very much alive.”
—Anniston Star
“Cahill has created a unique way of writing about history.… [He] has rejuvenated and revitalized the historical genre. After reading Desire of the Everlasting Hills, many readers may want to pick up the New Testament, which is the primary source of this book, and read it again with fresh eyes.”
—Durham Herald-Sun
“A rich book.… Here, at last and at least for our times, is a book about Jesus big enough to contain the world of believers, Christians and Jews, agnostics, skeptics and even scoffers.”
—Grand Rapids Press
The Hinges of History
We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.
In this series, THE HINGES OF HISTORY, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, finally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.
The Hinges of History
VOLUME I
HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION
THE UNTOLD STORY OF IRELAND’S HEROIC ROLE FROM THE FALL OF ROME TO THE RISE OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE
This introductory volume presents the reader with a new way of looking at history. Its time period—the end of the classical period and the beginning of the medieval period—enables us to look back to our ancient roots and forward to the making of the modern world.
VOLUME II
THE GIFTS OF THE JEWS
HOW A TRIBE OF DESERT NOMADS CHANGED THE WAY EVERYONE THINKS AND FEELS
This is the first of three volumes on the creation of the Western world in ancient times. It is first because its subject matter takes us back to the earliest blossoming of Western sensibility, there being no West before the Jews.
VOLUME III
DESIRE OF THE EVERLASTING HILLS
THE WORLD BEFORE AND AFTER JESUS
This volume, which takes as its subject Jesus and the first Christians, comes directly after The Gifts of the Jews, because Christianity grows directly out of the unique culture of ancient Judaism.
VOLUME IV
WHY THE GREEKS MATTER
The Greek contribution to our Western heritage comes to us largely through the cultural conduit of the Romans (who, though they do not have a volume of their own, are a presence in Volumes I, III, IV, and V). The Greek contribution, older than Christianity, nevertheless continues past the time of Jesus and his early followers and brings us to the medieval period. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea concludes our study of the making of the ancient world.
VOLUME V
MYSTERIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES
AND THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN WORLD
The high Middle Ages are the first iteration of the combined sources of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultures that make Western civilization singular. In the fruitful interaction of these sources, science and realistic art are rediscovered and feminism makes its first appearance in human history.
VOLUMES VI AND VII
These volumes will continue and conclude our investigation of the making of the modern world and the impact of its cultural innovations on the sensibility of the West.
By Thomas Cahill
THE HINGES OF HISTORY
INTRODUCTORY VOLUME:
How the Irish Saved Civilization
THE MAKING OF THE ANCIENT WORLD:
The Gifts of the Jews
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD:
Mysteries of the Middle Ages
Two additional volumes are planned on the making of the modern world.
Also by Thomas Cahill
A Literary Guide to Ireland (with Susan Cahill)
Jesus’ Little Instruction Book
Pope John XXIII
A Saint on Death Row (forthcoming)