SAINTS WHO MADE HISTORY: The First Five Centuries

This book meets a real need in a highly competent and very interesting fashion. The relevance today of an understanding of the patristic age is undeniable. Here, in one volume, the exciting and inspiring history of the first five centuries of the Church's development is presented through the medium of scholarly but humanly appealing biographical sketches of the great saints of the earliest eras, giants like Ignatius and Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Athanasius, Basil, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Patrick, Pope Leo the Great and others. The period is replete with significant and complicated developments, but the author employs her erudition unobtrusively and eminently succeeds in clarifying for the general reader the basic historical issues, characters and achievements of the dominant personalities, and doctrinal and organizational features of each succeeding ecclesiastical era.