THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

Over the course of 36 lectures, Professor Phillip Cary, director of the philosophy program at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, proceeds, at a necessarily brisk clip, through 20 centuries of the flowering, ramifying history of Christian doctrine. There's a lot to cover, from Paul and the Gospels to the Church fathers, the philosophical accretions of the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the modern ecumenical movement, and more. Cary pulls the vast subject matter together smartly, and his argument is easy to follow. If you've listened to Cary's earlier lectures for The Teaching Company, you'll be glad to know he has lost the habit of appending a mumbled "right?" to the ends of many of his declarative sentences. The teaching here is crisp, enlightening, and tic free. M.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2009]