From the Notebooks
Dr. Carroll published the first volume of this projected-seven volume set in 1985. Called The Founding of Christendom, it took the reader from Genesis to Emperor Constantine, whose conversion in 313 made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and brought Christianity to center stage. The second volume, The Building of Christendom, covered the years 325 to 1100, recounting the fierce heresies that plagued the Church, the fall of the Roman Empire and the crucial role the Church played in the preservation of Western Civilization following the fall, the Dark Ages when Europe's existence was threatened from Islam, Vikings, and marauders from the steppes (e.g., Huns). The third volume, The Glory of Christendom, recounts the Catholic Church's (and Christianity's) greatest years, from 1100-1517, from St. Bernard's founding of the great abbey of Clairvaux to the Catholic navigational adventures that brought the Faith to the New World and the Far East–and all the Christian greatness found in the intervening centuries: Saints Francis and Dominic and the establishment of their orders, the intellectual flowering of the thirteenth century embodied in St. Thomas Aquinas, the (admittedly flawed) heroism of the Crusades, the art of the Renaissance.
