Dr Paul Allen

Dr. Rodney Stark has written nearly 40 books on a wide range of topics, incuding a number of recent books on the history of Christianity, monotheism, Christianity in China, and the roots of modernity. After beginning as a newspaper reporter and spending time in the Army, Stark received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He later was Professor of Sociology and of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington; he has been at Baylor University since 2004. Stark is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and he has won a number of national and international awards for distinguished scholarship. Raised as a Lutheran, he has identified himself as an agnostic but has, more recently, called himself an “independent Christian”. His most recent book...

The most important question, of course, is “What were the middle ages? What was the character of them?” In textbooks, maybe a hundred years ago, they were often referred to as the “Dark Ages” and that was a wonderful way of being able to say nothing important happens and we can skip it. And there’s a, particularly, a Protestant tendency to do that. Okay, Augustine died, when exactly did Luther come along? Let's go from one good guide to another and let's ignore the fact that there are only about eleven hundred years between them and surely nothing much could have happened in those eleven hundred years. Let's get to the Reformation. Well, they weren’t a Dark Age. They were, in fact, an age of a great deal of cultural and intellectual and ecclesiastical accomplishment that is very important and we need to take a serious look at. Dark Ages (ca. 1200–800 BC): Mass Migrations and Development of Homeric Epics. The Dark Ages were a time of great migrations and devel...