The Christian World : A Global History by Martin Marty

I was pretty excited to see this book come out. It's hardly a newsflash that Martin Marty, an institution at University of Chicago and longtime author of books about religion in American life and Church history, would write a global history of the Christian faith. But typically books on this topic are quite long and very dense and if anyone can pull this topic off with brevity it is Dr. Marty. And so in 200 pages he takes us from the Jewish origins of Christianity in Israel to its present day explosion in China and Africa. What I appreciate about Marty's book and others of its ken is that Church history has for too long only been covered only from the Western perspective. In other words, it is as if Christ sent his apostles out after His ascension and the only place Christianity took root was Europe and North America and the only real highlight was the Protestant Reformation with all previous Catholic expressions of faith portrayed as spiritual darkness. The fact is that Christianity is an Asian religion (Israel representing the far west of the East) that has had deep roots in Africa, India, Persia, and China long before Martin Luther, the Puritans, and modern-day revivalism. Marty doesn't deconstruct or denigrate the Western story of Christianity either. But rather he gives it a broader context and shows its interactions with Christians and peoples of other faiths around the world. This books is a great primer to a huge and largely neglected topic.