Dr. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is Associate Professor of History and Western Civilization at Australian Catholic University. She received her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and held a Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. She converted from atheism to Christianity while an Assistant Professor at Florida State University. Her first book, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire, won the Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Award for Nonfiction. She and her husband Johnathan live in Sydney, Australia, with their three children and are members of an Anglican church in the Diocese of Sydney. ... Read more Read less
How can Christians engage meaningfully with history?
In an age underpinned by the idea that life is about self-invention and fulfilment,
contemporary Western culture holds that the past has little to teach us. We live in what
this book terms the "Ahistoric Age," in which we are profoundly disconnected from
history.
In the attempt to appear relevant, the church often embraces this ahistoric worldview
by jettisoning the historic ideas and practices of Christian formation. But this has
unintended consequences, leaving Christians unmoored from history and losing the
ability to grapple with its ethical complexities.
In Priests of History, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker draws upon her expertise, and her
experience as an atheist who has become a Christian, to examine what history is and
why it matters. If Christians can learn how to be "priests of history," tending and
keeping our past, history can help us strengthen and revive our spiritual and
intellectual formation and equip us to communicate the gospel in a confused and
rootless world.
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