Twelve Churches: An unlikely history of the buildings that made Christianity

<p><b>With his trademark reverence and revelry, The Revd. Fergus Butler-Gallie travels through time and place to get to the heart of the religion he is so passionate about. <br></b><br>In this book he takes us from Bethlehem and the birth of Christ some 2000-odd years ago, to the immediate present and future of Christianity. He brings together a Baptist Church in the segregationist American South with a medieval monastery in the heart of the Greek countryside; the Vatican - beautiful, imposing, vainglorious, the seat of Catholicism - with a sparse, tiny private church above the rocky coastline of Southern Japan. <br><br><i>Twelve Churches</i> is a quest for a new people''s history of Christianity, told through the stories of twelve churches scattered across the globe. Through a patchwork of interlinking and varied human stories, Butler-Gallie takes us on a physical and historical journey, exploring the role of hope, faith and beauty in Christianity, but also its fraught relationships with sex, violence and power. <br><br>The story of Christianity is, he shows, the story of our modern world: it''s a story of who we should be, as well who we sometimes are.</p>

ISBN-13: 9781399731324