Well!  Will wonders never cease!  Here is a post on my almost forgotten Blogger blog..... last post was in the Fall of 2021.   Mostly what I am doing here is to mine information for a book I am forming in my mind on the religion of ordinary people. Christianity to be specific as I have some expertise here.

This was prompted by my trudge through a book called Ancient Christianities by Paula Fredricksen.  She is an historian but apparently an historian of theology with a veiled dislike for Christianity. Anyway, although she does devote parts of the latter part of the book to the faith of ordinary people, mostly it is an analysis and account of theological battles in the early 'Christianities'.  This is probably a correct term for Christianity then and now, but does miss the grounding of all these various sects.  My teaching in three courses, two variations of a course called Religion & Society in the Modern World and World Religions focuses on belief as lived by most people.  I include basic theology and theological disputes but these represent the faith of, shall I borrow from today, the 1% (or less).  My doctoral dissertation concentrated on faith lived at the parish level in Anglican churches in pre-WW1 Hamilton Ontario, not on the theological battles of the intellectual and clerical elites - though they affected and altered lay practice and belief.  Shall I say, I looked up from the grass roots, while most histories look down from the heights with a special attention paid to the clouds rather than the grass below.

This is an apologia for this slowly forming book...... and I will post the same here and in SubStack.  And may this, at least, on Linkedin.