Books like One True God by Rodney Stark

The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller that dramatizes the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693, reflecting on McCarthyism and American history through allegory.

Jared Diamond analyses why great civilizations collapse, linking environmental misuse, climate change, population pressures, and trade instability as common causes, and offering lessons from societies that survived.

Craig of the Mohicans, a frontier scout turns away from civilization, forming a bond with a Mohican warrior as they escort two sisters across the perilous wilderness of America's frontier.

E. H. Gombrich’s classic survey traces the evolution of visual culture from ancient times through the modern era, offering an accessible and insightful history of art.

This comprehensive survey explores the evolving relationship between science and technology throughout human history.

Celebrated religious and social historian Rodney Starktraces the extraordinary rise of Christianity through its most pivotal andcontroversial moments to offer fresh perspective on the history of the world's largest religion. In The Triumph of Christianity, the author of God's Battalions and The Rise of Christianity gathers and refines decades of powerful research and discovery into one concentrated, concise, and highly readable volume that explores Christianity's most crucial episodes. The unique format of The Triumph of Christianity allows Stark to avoid dense chronologies and difficult back stories, bringing readers right to the heart of Christian history's most vital controversies and enduring lessons. - Publisher.

This book traces how the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was God emerged and evolved in the early church, revealing the historical, textual, and theological steps that shaped the doctrine of Jesus’s divinity.

A captivating exploration of Christianity's growth and spread across the Roman Empire through quantitative data and groundbreaking insights from prominent historian Rodney Stark.

The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilization. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that addresses beliefs as well as historical facts, Rodney Stark brings a sociologist's perspective to bear on the puzzle behind the success of early Christianity. He comes equipped not only with the logic and methods of social science but also with insights gathered firsthand into why people convert and how new religious groups recruit members. He digs deep into the historical evidence on many issues - such as the social background of converts, the mission to the Jews, the status of women in the church, the role of martyrdom - to provide a vivid and unconventional picture of early Christianity.

Bart Ehrman’s accessible history shows how Christianity became the dominant force of the Roman world, reshaping art, law, philosophy, and more.

Robert Wright traces the evolution of monotheistic faiths from the Stone Age to the Information Age, revealing a hidden pattern that reshapes our understanding of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and suggests a future of religious harmony.

A biography of the physicists who sought a unified theory of physics.

Exploring the origins and spread of world religions from the Stone Age to the Axial Age.

Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms--Yhwh, God, or Allah--by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE. That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe--the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah--that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism. A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world's leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered. (Publisher).