Distinguished Professor of History

Education:

Ph.D. Cambridge University, 1978

Selected Publications:

• A History of the United States, Fourth edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011.
• The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity, Third edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, And Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe For The Next 1,500 Years, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2010. 328 pages.
• The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008.
• God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Decade of Nightmares: The End of the 1960s and the Making of Eighties America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

To date, my books have been translated into fourteen languages: Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian and Spanish.

Book in Progress:

Four Horsemen: The Catastrophic Four Years That Remade The World's Religions. (Under contract to Harper One).

This is a study of the religious dimensions of the First World War, and its enduring impact on Christianity and other faiths worldwide. I am arguing that the war should be seen as a global religious revolution in its own right.

Research Interests:

I work in several quite diverse fields. Broadly, my major current interests include the study of global Christianity, past and present; of new and emerging religious movements; and of twentieth century US history, chiefly post-1975. I also have an enduring interest in issues of crime and deviance, and the construction of social problems.

My current work focuses on the era of the First World War, which I am trying to approach through a wide-ranging cultural and intellectual history, besides more familiar political and military dimensions.