Places You Go Book

I can't imagine a more accessible and lucid overview of Christianity than Martin Marty's 1959 hidden classic. Brevity is its strength and if Marty gets a little breezy and perhaps a little too pleased with his own prose versatility you pay it no mind and keep gathering up tons of useful information while you eat peanuts and lay on your brown sofa.

Marty is a now retired University of Chicago professor and author of over 50 books about religion, history, ethics, an all around nice guy, and gifted synthesizer of Western moral tradition. This was an early book for him and probably the kind that would embarrass an older writer reflecting in hindsight. But that's how these kind of things get off the ground, cocky, precocious, little twerps take on the whole world like its their birthright and do what most every book of its kind has failed to do. Tell a person within a reasonable timeframe what this or that religion is about, where it came from, who practices it, and how it got to be the way it is; without insulting your intelligence or trying to get you to send a check to TBN.

Marty is an ordained Lutheran minister who clearly has an iron in the fire but he's so intelligent and scrupulous with the historical record and its relevant meanings that you end up learning a lot. Which is all you can really ask for.

It would get 5 stars but I feel like he's a little too smug and dismissive of early church heterodoxy, particularly Gnosticism, and he continually cheerleads for the slow accretion of intellectual beuaracracy that is mainstream Christian creedalism and canon formation. If you didn't grow up in a church or missed Medieval history 101 Marty's vocabulary and approach will seem a little strange but he does a great job of presenting the institutional and philosophical development of the early church, Catholic Church, the Reformation, and later social philosopher/theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries. Eminently readable and very useful overview of European intellectual history.