seven revolutions -- a book review

Mike Aquilina and James Papandrea are both authors for whom I've had a long-standing respect.  Aquilina's The Mass of Early Christians is a modern classic in liturgical studies, and Papandrea's Reading the Early Church Fathers and Trinity 101 are books I regularly reference and recommend to students.  So their new book, Seven Revolutions:  How Christianity Changed the World and Can Change It Again was a must-read on my lists, and I was overjoyed to receive my copy.  Both are excellent writers who have a way of weaving the narratives of the Church's history into tales that you don't want to put down.  Seven Revolutions is yet another of those weavings.  I read the book in one sitting.

In Seven Practices Aquilina and Papandrea illustrate the ways in which early Christians set about revolutionizing the Roman world.  In fact, the narratives they weave demonstrate all the ways the Church shaped Western civilization in the last few centuries of the Roman world:  The government, the community, the home, work, religion, life and even the nature of being human. 

Seven Revolutions isn't just a book of history, though.  They take one important step out of the past:  The Church, when it realizes the power it has as the Body of Christ in the world, can revitalize and renew our world -- here and now.  So this book really is a book for revolutionaries, not historians.

What this means, of course, is that Christians today need the same spiritual daring of love that the Christians had in the Roman world.  The Church Father, Tertullian, once insisted that "as the soul is to the body, so Christians are to the world".  Seven Revolutions demonstrates all the ways in which this is true -- then and now.

So this is a must-read, especially for Christians who have become disenfranchised and demoralized.  As Augustine heard in the garden, so now I say to you:  "Tolle, lege -- take up, and read!"

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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.