Philip Jenkins

“Yet even when such languages did not face direct official sanction, speakers of older tongues knew that they had little chance of…

— Philip Jenkins

“Christianity offers similar stories, and the global Christianity that perished in the late Middle Ages has revived in the past century. China…

— Philip Jenkins

“Where the African church failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and…

— Philip Jenkins

“Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the…

— Philip Jenkins

“Perhaps theological attempts to explain the destruction of churches or of “Christian nations” are asking the wrong question, if they judge success…

— Philip Jenkins

“Another difficulty with the reservation scheme was that it reinforced the popular association of Christianity with foreign imperialism, and thus with enmity…

— Philip Jenkins

“Far from anti-Christian purges ceasing with the official end of war in 1918, they actually intensified during the ensuing war between Greece…

— Philip Jenkins

“Middle Eastern Christians, in short, tried every possible tactic to survive and flourish, and their efforts have largely failed. Partly, this is…

— Philip Jenkins

“Besides the missionary theology cultivated by many churches, we also need a theology of extinction.”

— Philip Jenkins

“Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the…

— Philip Jenkins

“Christianity in this region remained as much a colonists’ religion as it would be once again during the French Empire of the…

— Philip Jenkins

“Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar…

— Philip Jenkins

“For much of the history of Islam, moreover, the Christian world was not noticeably ahead in political or economic power, or in…

— Philip Jenkins

“While nobody can pretend that Christian religious practice is thriving in most of Europe, the situation is nothing as grim as some…

— Philip Jenkins

Religion appears in so many contexts in WW1. Religion shaped the national identities and ambitions of several of the key players, especially…

— Philip Jenkins

“The violence that began in 1915 killed perhaps half the Armenian Christians in the region. Although the accumulated stories of massacre numb…

— Philip Jenkins

“Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest…

— Philip Jenkins

“Dalrymple reported finding literally the city’s last Armenian Christian, “a very old lady called Lucine,” who had not spoken since her husband…

— Philip Jenkins

Apocalyptic expectations ran riot in 1917, and had a major influence on Allied policies towards Palestine and the Jewish people. The propaganda…

— Philip Jenkins

“In trying to understand the death of churches, several possible explanations come to mind, some much less convincing to modern ears than…

— Philip Jenkins

“Some of the reasons that a modern observer might identify for the church’s decline need not necessarily have been fatal. Over the…

— Philip Jenkins

“The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far…

— Philip Jenkins

“Without dioceses, local parishes and village churches could barely continue, even if the villages themselves could have long survived the constant turmoil…

— Philip Jenkins

“Even when Coptic itself gave way to Arabic, Christianity was too thoroughly naturalized to vanish without a lengthy struggle. Not all the…

— Philip Jenkins

Famine, plague, death and war... that's a pretty good description of 1917-18. The war was meant to end quickly, but by 1917…

— Philip Jenkins