Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church

by William Caferro

A discussion by a broadly respected authority of the complicated relationship between theology and ordinary life in the early church. The first section of the book scrutinizes theology with a view to understanding its bearing upon Christian understandings of life (the theological “stories” of Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine). The second section examines aspects of ordinary life and explores how Christians related them to religious ideas (the family, hospitality, citizenship, monasticism, and attitudes toward the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West).

This very learned piece of work, which reflects lengthy study of original texts as well as of the current and important secondary literature, is distinctive because it does not conform to the present reigning The author writes as a convinced Christian thinker. He believes that there is no such thing as a purely detached observer and that the best way of being critical and fair is to make no secret of one’s presuppositions, but to face them so as to be able to discount them when necessary. This quality makes the work interesting and suggestive. The book is of importance to scholars and theologians and to all concerned with the early church.

Genres: History, Theology

307 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1990

About the author

William Caferro teaches medieval European history at Vanderbilt University. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended James Madison High School. He received his bachelor’s degree from Haverford College in 1984 (with a history major at Bryn Mawr College) and his Ph.D from Yale University in 1992 (where he primarily studied Greek and Latin patristic). From 1984 to 1987, he taught high school mathematics in New York City and Connecticut.

William Caferro specializes in the history of medieval and Renaissance Italy. His research has focused on the transition from the medieval to Renaissance periods, on ascertaining the distinction between the two, particularly with regard to economic forces.
Caferro is author of Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Johns Hopkins, 1998) and John Hawkwood, English Mercenary in Fourteenth Century Italy (Johns Hopkins, 2006). John Hawkwood won the Otto Grundler Prize from the International Medieval Congress as the best book in medieval studies (2008). He is co-author of The Spinelli: Fortunes of a Renaissance Family (Penn State, 2001) and co-editor of The Unbounded Community: Papers in Christian Ecumenism in Honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (Routledge, 1996). His most recent book Contesting the Renaissance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) traces the meaning and use of the term "Renaissance" in the major debates of the historiography.