In terms of nonfiction, I just like very, very good history books. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the new biography Thomas Cromwell: A Life, is speaking at the Yorkshire Museum, York, on Friday, 14 December 2018.Tickets are £12 and available on their website.The event is presented by friends of the HWA, the York Literature Festival.. Imogen Robertson, Chair of the HWA, spoke to him last week. At Launde Abbey last month, Dame Hilary Mantel and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflected on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his place in the Reformation. Not everyone wants to do it, but those who can, ought to. Who kicked them out? Diarmaid MacCulloch – arguably the most influential historian of the Church in the world and one of Britain’s most distinguished living historians per se, seems to have taken up the challenge. His History of Christianity: ... Hannah Arendt: An Interview. Diarmaid MacCulloch has 33 books on Goodreads with 34821 ratings. He is perhaps best known for his work on the Reformation in England and Europe, including Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 and biographies of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell . To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. That imperative—‘Silence!’—is the roar of dogma, and yet you suggest that silence can also be an antidote to dogma. Date 11 Jul 2016. In 2012, we remembered the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; also, we remembered the 450th anniversary of John Jewel's sober, scholarly, and Reformed "An Apology of the Church of England. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch talks to Ralph Jones about how personal experience has shaped his ideas about sex and Christianity. Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the … Brilliant. I felt cheered at the end of it, in a way that I didn’t necessarily feel I would. My father was really quite old – he was born in 1903 – and he had two older sisters, who gave me the books that they’d enjoyed when they were young. That was a sort of personal exploration of what my opinion of the Christian faith was, and, on balance, it did me good. MacCulloch said in an interview that "there are also many conflicts" within Christianity, "and these are particularly serious in the Roman Catholic church, which seems on the verge of a very great split over the Vatican's failure to listen to European Catholics." Aside from your books and your duties here in Oxford, you’ve presented three BBC series (A History of Christianity, How God Made the English, and Henry VIII’s fixer: the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell) and remain a much valued voice in the contemporary Church of England…, Well, not valued by the bishops! Anyway, the West is substantially a place where people are not going to church much, and don’t look to the Church for authoritative answers any more—partly because the answers are still stupid. It’s chilling. It’s the joy of seeing someone do the job as well as you could do it yourself. Sunday, March 24, 2013 by John Cleary with Diarmaid MacCulloch . I’m very old fashioned in that way. Otherwise, my reading is determinedly frivolous, because otherwise for half the year I’m a Wolfson prize judge, the great history prize, and so we end up reading about 120 books in six months, and that whole treadmill is starting this month, in July, and goes on to February. However, he eventually declined ordination in response to a motion overwhelmingly passed by the Church’s General Synod condemning homosexuality in 1987. It’s very easy for historians, because history is so fascinating. But there is still something which some of these people find captivating, for reasons which may not be the conventional ones from the past. Buy The Books. The Cromwell who reveals himself over the course of her novels is very close to the Cromwell I met. Delving deeply into Cromwell’s private papers, MacCulloch argues for Cromwell’s central position in the supercharged power-politics of Henry VIII’s court. In 2012, he was knighted for services to scholarship. So it is a moral task and it’s a peculiarly destructive and critical task as well because it’s always combating the simplicities, the crudities, the bullying of future generations by a version of the past. ‘My reading is determinedly frivolous’: Diarmaid MacCulloch. The problem is avoiding the simple version of the past, which is the property of fanatics. Revised several times since its first publication in 1955 England Under the Tudors charts a historical … The format of the Gifford Lectures invites six different topics, and I managed (praise be to the Lord!) And the one word that historians have to use all the time, and novelists don’t, or shouldn’t, is “probably”. It’s also very good fun, and fascinating because it works at such a different level from what we do here. Again, very nice and warm-hearted, but with terrible stereotypes of what it is to be female, and the sharper female theologians in the Roman church have noticed this and have begun to say, well, hang on, can’t we update the Pope on that? The silencing of Loisy and Duchesne makes me think of your latest book, Silence: a Christian History. I suppose it started thinking these things in the late seventeenth century with the Enlightenment, and its relationship with the Enlightenment doesn’t seem to me to be necessarily an antagonistic one. It’s still there as a witness and it’s carrying a spirit which clearly has some value to the people of Sweden, so we’ve just got to look for different models I think. Professor MacCulloch is perhaps the greatest living historian of the English Reformation, if not Christianity as a whole (pace the article, he is head and shoulders above David Starkey) and someone with an impressive track record of encouraging younger Reformation … The Church rejected me because I'm gay. Professor MacCulloch’s ‘History of Christianity’ was made into a BBC TV series. I re-write everything on site, after some very quick arguments with the producer. And that’s no way to run a church. Can you get this across? Big hat tip to KH for finding this: Summer Season: Reformation – Europe’s House Divided, by Diarmaid MacCulloch. And there are negative ones and positive ones as you suggest. His biography of Thomas Cranmer, architect of the Church of England, won a string of awards including the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1996, and was succeeded by a panoramic history of the Reformation, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, in 2003. English historian and academic, specialising in ecclesiastical history and … How do you view the differences and affinities between the two?Hilary and I did an event together last Monday at Launde Abbey, where Thomas Cromwell’s son is buried. MacCulloch studied under the great Tudor historian Sir Geoffrey Elton. How historically accurate are the Wolf Hall books?Hilary likes her story and her characters to be as close to what we know of the past as possible. on Tuesday, 30 September 2003 at 10.28 am by Simon Sarmiento categorised as Opinion. • Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch is published by Penguin (£12.99). We all read all the books from all periods. Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the world’s leading religious historians. And one of them, at the end of one of my sessions on the early Church, despairingly said, ‘Well, where is the good news in all this?’ And I could see what he was saying (whatever ghastly phase of the early Church we’d been talking about). 58m 11s Pink Floyd: Live in Venice. Get immediate access to the current issue and over 20,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App. St Patrick’s Purgatory 1 August 2019. Filed Under: Features, Interviews Tagged With: author interview, biography, Diarmaid MacCulloch, history, Imogen Robertson, interview, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cromwell: A Life. An Interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch. The interview was not however about his book, but about the current debate on sexuality. Which fiction and nonfiction writers do you admire?I will say Hilary Mantel. Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch has written a noisy book about silence. ― Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch Geoffrey Elton (1921 – 1994) was one of the great historians of the Tudor period. I got very irritated with his master, Henry VIII. Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford. It comes as a revelation to the committed. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Big hat tip to KH for finding this: Summer Season: Reformation – Europe’s House Divided, by Diarmaid MacCulloch Diarmaid MacCulloch See Diarmaid MacCulloch at these events: British Academy Lecture. See offers . Valued all the more for that! Otherwise, I’m quite lowbrow as far as fiction goes. Diarmaid MacCulloch brings wonderful scholarship, wit and humanity with a delightfully fresh biography of Thomas Cromwell, shot through with new insights. They’re two different ways of approaching reality, and I know which I would choose. Medicine is clearly vital to our physical well-being, physicists do things which I can’t do, but very few other disciplines are about combating corporate insanity. I did. He’s got big problems because of his sympathy with Africa and his unwillingness therefore to tackle the unattractive aspects of African Christianity. It seems to me that its future can only be rosy, partly because it’s going through such travails at the moment. This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. 6 likes. Liberals had lost their mojo and the wings looked triumphant, but that’s partly because liberals were too decent to challenge them. Author: Diarmaid MacCulloch Publication date: 2010-03 Amazon. 17 February, 2014 • Issue 24.3 • Interviews • Religion. Liberalism comes in, and all is swept away. In 2009, he took on a still larger canvas in A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, which was adapted for an extremely popular BBC series in 2010. Yes—particularly if you tell the story of the early Church, in a historian’s way. The Enlightenment is a Christian response, and a Jewish response, to a crisis in authority, from Spinoza onwards. Sign in. Are you impressed by Pope Francis? Books interview: Diarmaid MacCulloch The church historian and author of All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation on the journey from E. Nesbit to Ian … At Launde Abbey last month, Dame Hilary Mantel and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflected on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his place in the Reformation. Good luck to him. And she has made adjustments in the new novel to reflect this. … He is currently Professor of History of the Church at Oxford University and has been a Fellow of St. Cross College since 1995. It’s fulfilled all the worst predictions about Russian Orthodoxy: that, given back power, it would just revel in it, like a dog rolling about in the dirt. It seems to me that this is one of the great watersheds, as Constantine was a watershed, and Gregory VII, and the Reformation. I think it was Cardinal Manning who said that ‘one must overcome history by dogma.’ So do you think dogma can be overcome by history? She’s been a bit miffed, in a gentle way, at the way in which she accepted things that were essentially wrong about Cromwell because she took them from the conventional narrative. I went on to the children’s historical authors of an earlier generation – GA Henty and the like. It’s called The Blanket of the Dark. I loved John Buchan, terrible old high Tory that he was. a very barbed but very careful statement about authority addressed to the Moscow Patriarchate. I relax to well-crafted murder. The Interview: Oxford Don Diarmaid McCulloch. It does seem to me to be a moral task, because otherwise it becomes pretty stories or antiquarianism; it becomes like stamp-collecting. And what’s interesting is that we’re just at the early stages of it. So it’s important to do it if you can. Five centuries ago next year, a teacher at an obscure university in Wittenberg, Germany, hung 95 discussion starters on the church door for his students on the subject of the sale of indulgences. There are so many different layers in the word and that’s what interested me in doing the book. People like the Catholic historian Alfred Loisy, who was excommunicated. Do you sink back into a leaden authoritarianism? Diarmaid MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church in the theology faculty at St Cross College, Oxford. Reading your book alongside Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series is fascinating. You said it has a very bright future—even in the West? The discussion was wide-ranging and covered a number of topics. The interview was not however about his book, but about the current debate on sexuality. But I never got bored of Thomas Cromwell, partly because of this vast archive of his personal papers that we have, that were taken when he was arrested and still had many secrets to reveal. Since 1995, he has been a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford; he was formerly the senior tutor. When I was an undergraduate—the late 60s, early 70s—the assumption in universities was that religion was going out, that there was no real point in it, studying it was antiquarianism. Natalie Grueninger speaks with Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch about Thomas Cromwell and his involvement in Anne Boleyn's downfall. Learn more about your host at On the Tudor Trail. He has written extensively on ecclesiastical history, and was ordained a deacon in the 1980s. Christianity’s got a similar story because it’s virtually extinct in its homeland and is now flourishing far from that homeland in very different guises. You can just lie back and bask in their professionalism. Diarmaid MacCulloch radio interview. I think the worm turned over the women episcopate business last November, when it was clear that the two opposing wings were very much a minority. ... Hannah Arendt: An Interview. on Monday, 17 January 2005 at 11.25 pm by Simon Sarmiento categorised as Book review. Diarmaid MacCulloch's recent history of Christianity is an expansive account of the religion's growth, struggles and paradoxes. on Tuesday, 30 September 2003 at 10.28 am by Simon Sarmiento categorised as Opinion. Title partner International radio partner Festival ideas partner Festival cultural partner Partner of Jewish programme Supporter of Italian programme Supporters of the Irish programme MIT Press. Image: Diarmaid MacCulloch ( ABC Local ) … What are the pleasures, and difficulties, of taking the long view? Join our Talking Tudors Podcast Facebook group for all the behind-the-scenes news and updates. I had that foundation of the best of children’s books. Interview: 1517 and all that Historian and TV presenter Diarmaid MacCulloch talks to Stephen Tomkins Five centuries ago next year, a teacher at an obscure university in Wittenberg, Germany, hung 95 discussion starters on the church door for his … Suddenly, religion was back and it’s not got any easier. He was ordained a deacon in the Church of England and is an openly gay man. It reminded me of something, again back in those Methodist days, when there were some fairly unsophisticated people in the classroom, and they often had a way of expressing things extremely straightforwardly. I think the turning point was 1977/78, when we saw Iran have its revolution hijacked by the Ayatollahs, when we got a counter-Reformation pope, and when a born-again Christian was elected President in Jimmy Carter. Do you fear that the sort of questioning, ‘liberal’ (for want of a better word) core of the Church of England is threatened by a pincer movement from the more die-hard Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals? Latest Releases The Three Paradises by Robert Fabbri . Prof. Related Audio: Oxford Don Diarmaid MacCulloch. www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/proginfo/tv/2009/wk45/history_feature.shtml As for the rest of the world, well, the West may provide a pattern for those parts of the Church which are expanding, when they face the same problems, after the century or so of ecstatic expansion. It’s the general historian’s duty to combat insanity in the human race and it does seem to me that that’s professional history’s main objective. We have not got tired, Hilary and I, of talking about the fascinating difference of looking at the same person from two points of view – one the historian, one the novelist. Your History of Christianity is breezily subtitled ‘the first three thousand years’. And if you think about the late nineteenth century when the views of those like Cardinal Manning became paramount – became absolutely salient in the Roman Church – the first target was the teaching of Church history. The Reverend Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch Kt FBA discusses the purpose of studying history and how it is presented, in order to learn from it for prosperity. What she can do is tell the stories which I cannot, because the facts simply aren’t there. Diarmaid MacCulloch. Well, it’s infinitely malleable, like all great world religions. The historian on his acclaimed biography of Thomas Cromwell, comparisons with Hilary Mantel, and his love of Scandi-noir, Last modified on Sun 14 Jul 2019 13.33 BST. History • Diarmaid MacCulloch An edited transcript of the longer interview is available to download here . While we’re lurking on church leadership, I do think Justin Welby’s had a remarkable start. Pilgrims And Progress: 3,000 Years Of Christianity Diarmaid MacCulloch is the author of a new book that chronicles the complete history … by Diarmaid MacCulloch. And we have a task against those academic disciplines which are very good at getting money, such as medicine, to keep our end up in the public eye. Well, the difficulty is there’s so much. So I devoured Mary Fulbrook on the Holocaust [Reckonings], I devoured John Blair on Saxon England [Building Anglo-Saxon England]. It was a cumulative process. While visiting that 'distant and barbarous' outpost of the Empire where the colonists 'grow indifferent [and] go on from bad to worse until they have shaken off all moral restraint' (as Mansfield Silverthorpe once… And the contrast with Francis is really very striking indeed. 0. So it’s like having a research team of 300 experts, who provide you with instant summaries of books, highlighting various interesting things about them, picking out anecdotes, showing what the shape is. Buy The Books. That’s a profound solvent to dogma. And the change of atmosphere he’s created is remarkable. An edited transcript of the longer interview is available to download here. Diarmaid MacCulloch is known above all for his award-winning studies of Tudor England and his BBC television documentaries on the history of Christianity. Search. Thomas Cromwell: A Life Wednesday, 3 April 2019. April 4, 2013, 6:51 pm. And I know my biography has been very useful to her, because the third of her novels has been influenced by it. So that’s a justification. An Interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch. And I think one of the exciting things about Western Christianity is that it is faced with the situation of what to do next. By Diarmaid MacCulloch (Viking, 2010) Haters of history often ask the point of knowing names and dates, pointing out correctly that all of that information can now be found online. But I said to him, the good news is that the Church is still there! And the task is to do what other disciplines can’t. Powered by WordPress. Winchester History Weekend 2018: 5 minutes with Diarmaid MacCulloch Save 50% on a BBC History Magazine or BBC History Revealed subscription Thomas Cromwell was a self-made statesman who married his son who had his son married to Henry VIII's sister-in-law, reshaped Tudor England and Ireland, and sent the kingdom on a Protestant course for centuries. Did you ever get bored of Cromwell?I never got bored with him. What was the last book you put down without finishing?I have not finished Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, and that is because I found everyone in it utterly repellent. DIARMAID MACCULLOCHWRITER, HISTORIAN & BROADCASTERDiarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, TV presenter and author. Diarmaid Ninian John MacCulloch Kt FSA FRHistS FBA (/ ˈ d ɜːr m ə d /; born 31 October 1951) is an English historian and academic, specialising in ecclesiastical history and the history of Christianity.Since 1995, he has been a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford; he was formerly the senior tutor.Since 1997, he has been Professor of the History of the Church at the University of … Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford. What is it? Diarmaid MacCulloch: interview. Diarmaid Ninian John MacCullouch (31 October 1951) is a British ecclesiastic historian. Geoffrey Elton had by no means cracked everything, partly because he was not terribly interested in Cromwell the man – he was interested in Cromwell the bureaucrat, Cromwell the creator of structures. Or do you look to churches which have lost their power, their overarching authority, and yet are struggling on, and not just struggling, but thinking seriously? One of Our Lord’s most wise sayings. They were speaking at an event to mark the 900 th anniversary of Launde Abbey, which Cromwell was fond of visiting. The Today programme this morning carried an interview with Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch (see here for review of his latest book). ... • Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch is published by Penguin (£12.99). And in a sense, that’s its salvation because, rather like Luther’s sense of utter despair at his sin, the liberating moment is when you say ‘I can’t do anything about that: what I can do is simply lie back on a sea of faith and get on with it’. A … Revenge of the Curia [the central administration of the Roman Catholic Church]? You say, ‘I can’t read everything, I’ll do my best, I’ll have some shapes in my mind and see whether the narrative fits’. Does the historian have particular moral responsibilities then? Diarmaid MacCulloch. The fact is there was never any comeback: it was a case of ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a yard’. Overnight, things have changed. Like “The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. The shout of anger which went up from the pews was very impressive and took the wind out of the sails of the extremes. So the rhythm is that you spend the morning writing from your notes and then go with your new text to the Bodleian Library in the afternoon after a nice college lunch, and the whole day has been an advancement. So it’s not a problem with Orthodoxy, but with the leadership of the Russian Church. They had an unerring instinct as to what a child would be interested in – Edith Nesbit, PG Wodehouse. Sponsors of the programme of American … While visiting that 'distant and barbarous' outpost of the Empire where the colonists 'grow indifferent [and] go on from bad to worse until they have shaken off all moral restraint' (as Mansfield Silverthorpe once… And that’s an important aspect of the man, but what I didn’t quite expect was how much of the personality came through from the archive. Diarmaid MacCulloch is professor of the History of the Church in the theology faculty at St Cross College, Oxford. Eamon Duffy sings the praises of Diarmaid MacCulloch's huge A History of Christianity, which encompasses everything from hymns to a holy parrot. How has it managed to reinvent itself so many times? My first job was in a theological college, a Methodist college in Bristol, and I plunged first year students into the history of the early Church straight away, which was a cruel thing to do because it’s really alien. His most recent book, Silence: A Christian History, was published last year. Exactly, exactly. Diarmaid MacCulloch Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of St Cross College and professor of the History of the Church at Oxford. Why does religious history matter? Apart from the fact that I enjoy radio and television, it seems to me what we historians must do. The moral task of historians is to find a way of telling a wider public what we’re up to, with a moral purpose in mind. We’ve suddenly remembered that most of the world is passionately concerned with religion. For nearly twenty years the extremists shouted louder and louder, and people courteously thought that they must listen and also give way. I started with the books which my kindly and conventional 1950s parents gave me, which were Biggles (by WE Johns) and Enid Blyton. It’s daunting. Get immediate access to the current issue and over 20,000 … It’s perhaps a hazard of being a parson’s son: you want to go on preaching. Diarmaid MacCulloch radio interview. Diarmaid Ninian John MacCulloch (born 31 October 1951) is a British historian and academic, specialising in ecclesiastical history and the history of Christianity. Topic. I think there are two joys: a) Christianity is expanding as a worldwide faith; and b) the peculiar and interesting situation of the Church in the West, by which I suppose we’re not talking about a place but a state of mind (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S., and Latin America, actually). And that’s what historians do. April 4, 2013. Fergus McGhee is reading for a second BA in English at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. to find a ‘silence’ for each one. Peter Bradley and Diarmaid MacCulloch (interview part 3) About our speaker. I thought this looked pretty desperate. The religious historian’s job is to complicate the past, in a useful way, and stop those simplified stories being told in order to avoid simplified versions of the future—the awful, chilling simplicities of, at its worst, Al-Qaeda, but any sort of fundamentalism. Subscribe to our Newsletters. So it’s a very difficult tiger to ride, I think. I read through the lot, and then, always, checked out everything by going back to the book, which of course is one of the great luxuries of Oxford, where you can more or less guarantee that every book you want is here. on Monday, 17 January 2005 at 11.25 pm by Simon Sarmiento categorised as Book review. Diarmaid MacCulloch. Diarmaid MacCulloch interview. Thomas Cromwell: A Life Wednesday, 3 April 2019. What sort of reader were you as a child?I was voracious. Professor MacCulloch proclaims himself a … Title partner International radio partner Festival ideas partner Festival cultural partner Partner of Jewish programme Supporter of Italian programme Supporters of the Irish programme MIT Press. ... Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the world’s leading religious historians. I might have got bored of the comparison if I didn’t think Hilary was brilliant, and not really a historical novelist, but just a brilliant novelist who in this instance has decided to write a novel about the 16th century. | Log in | RSS | Follow @OxonianReview, is reading for a second BA in English at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Since 1997, he has been Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. Much resented by some…. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review, Copyright © The Oxonian Review. Well, hugely, and it brings us back to the question about morality. The event took the form of a conversation. So, oddly enough, under Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, I think things have vastly improved. The names are odd, the culture is completely different, and yet I thought it was important to get a sense of how provisional and accidental the history of the early Church was. Yes, there are vested interests, but it’s also the release of expectations—it’s like the history of France in the nineteenth century. Diarmaid MacCulloch vs. the Catholic Curia. They lost the plot a bit when I was 14 or 15, but up till then, they got it just right. The more you know Henry, the more you dislike him: the intense egotism of the man and the way he distorts the lives of everyone around him. England Under the Tudors is his major work and an outstanding history of a crucial and turbulent period in British and European history. Diarmaid MacCulloch: interview. He is now professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. It seems to me that silence is actually the salvation of religion, because behind most propositional religions there is the greater silence. Not many people know that. Diarmaid MacCulloch is similar to these academics: Julia Barrow, Douglas Davies, Morwenna Ludlow and more. On this week’s podcast — taken from our archive — Dame Hilary and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch reflect on the life of Thomas Cromwell and his place in the Reformation. Already a subscriber? Books interview History books. They were speaking in July 2019 at an event to mark the 900th anniversary of Launde Abbey, which Cromwell was fond of visiting. Could you say a little about that? Natalie Grueninger speaks with Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch about Thomas Cromwell and his involvement in Anne Boleyn's downfall. The new Archbishop of Canterbury. Join our Talking Tudors Podcast Facebook group for all the behind-the-scenes news and updates. Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the recently-published Silence: A Christian History, was in Australia a few months ago as a guest of The Adelaide Writers’ Week. After studying Tudor history at Cambridge under Sir Geoffrey Elton, MacCulloch spent a decade teaching church history in Bristol before training for ministry in the Church of England. It’s a sort of craftsman’s fascination for me—can you do it? In this interview with MRB’s editor-in-chief Timothy Michael Law, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch discusses his aims as a historian, his prolific career in writing and on television, shifts in the field of early modern history over the past several decades, and the challenge Christianity now faces with same-sex relations. Church, in a way of being simple and yet being true to a structure... Difficulties, of taking the long view is tell the stories which I can not because! At on the Tudor period by Simon Sarmiento categorised as book review I know which I not! All my wonderful patrons... 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February, 2014 • issue 24.3 • Interviews • religion thought that they must listen also... Property of fanatics was a joy being presented to Christianity in – Edith Nesbit, PG..