Listen, watch and history

The history behind the questions

Many disagreements make sense only once you know how they arose. Start with the approachable ones.

• The Great Heresies
  Hilaire Belloc, 1938 · about 160 pages · Arianism, Islam, the Albigensians, the Reformation and the modern attack, told briskly as the Church's great quarrels. Partisan, and meant to be.
  Journal

  Helps with: How are we made right with God?; Who interprets revelation?; The office of Peter; The body and its desires

• The Orthodox Church
  Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, 1963 · about 350 pages · The standard introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy, half history, half belief and worship, by an English convert who became a bishop.
  Journal

  Helps with: The procession of the Holy Spirit; The office of Peter; What is salvation for?; God's essence and His energies; What are the Eastern Catholic Churches?; Icons and images

• Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
  Peter Brown
  Journal

  Helps with: How does grace move the will?; How fallen is human nature?; Church and state

• The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine
  Jaroslav Pelikan, 1971 · 5 volumes · What the Church believed, taught and confessed, century by century, East and West, by a scholar who ended his life in Orthodoxy.
  Journal

  Helps with: Does doctrine develop?; The procession of the Holy Spirit; How are we made right with God?; How does grace move the will?; Icons and images; God's essence and His energies

• The Stripping of the Altars
  Eamon Duffy, 1992
  Journal

  Helps with: Liturgical development; What do the sacraments do?; How are we made right with God?

• The Unintended Reformation
  Brad S. Gregory, 2012 · about 600 pages · How late-medieval metaphysics and the Reformation's quarrels, without anyone meaning it, produced a secular, pluralist West.
  Journal

  Helps with: Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; How are we made right with God?; Who interprets revelation?; Is truth objective?; Church and state