Angelo Di Berardino

Rethinking Early Christian Mission maps the complex diffusion of Christianity from rural Galilee to imperial dominance. Di Berardino looks beyond standard mission narratives to explore the social geography of expansion, emphasizing the roles of everyday believers-including slaves, soldiers, and women-in transmitting the faith. This nuanced study of identity formation and technical vocabulary challenges our understanding of "Christianization" in the Roman world.

Ancient Christianity: The Development of its Institutions and Practices is the fruit of Angelo Di Berardino's forty years of study, teaching, and writing at the Augustinianum in Rome. In this volume, he offers an overview of the birth and development of Ancient Christianity's institutions and practices in all their variety and diversity. The volume retraces the first five centuries identifying how ecclesiastical institutions arose, developed, and were consolidated into their full maturity. It is a task fraught with difficulty because of the scarcity and fragmentary nature of the information preserved from different geographical regions and people who have inherited distinct traditions. The chronological and geographical context of the evidence presents a challenge for historians looking to provide a more or less unified framework instead of an impressionistic pastiche. Often authors cite a few texts and generalize them, offering a homogeneous but false vision. Insisting on the inclusion of regional and diverse sources, Di Berardino deftly demonstrates that Christianity, from its beginnings and throughout its whole history, has always been multi-faceted. The culmination of decades of research, Ancient Christianity: The Development of Its Institutions and Practices will be an indispensable resource for years to come.

2014 Midwest Publishing Association Award of Excellence (Scholarly/Reference)2014 Readers' Choice Awards Honorable Mention The Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity covers eight centuries of the Christian church and comprises 3,220 entries by a team of 266 scholars from 26 countries representing a variety of Christian traditions. It draws upon such fields as archaeology, art and architecture, biography, cultural studies, ecclesiology, geography, history, philosophy, and theology. This three-volume encyclopedia offers unparalleled, comprehensive coverage of the people, places, and ideas of ancient Christianity. The encyclopedia's A-to-Z coverage extends from "Aaron (iconography)" to "Zosimus, pope" and chronologically from Christianity's origins to Bede (d. 735) in the West and John of Damascus (d. ca. 749) in the Greek East, with detailed emphasis on the first four centuries of Christian history. This edition updates and expands on previous Italian and English-language editions with the addition of more than 500 new articles (added to the current Italian or English edition), including 30 articles exclusive to IVP's edition. Extensive cross-referencing provides ease in exploring related articles, and helpful bibliographies, including primary sources (texts, critical editions, translations) and key secondary sources (books and journal articles), give access to the very latest in-depth scholarship in countless disciplines of study. IVP's new Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity (2014) is translated from Nuovo dizionario patristico e di antichita cristiane (2006-2008), produced by the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, the world's foremost center for partristic studies, under the direction of Professor Angelo Di Berardino, and it greatly updates and expands the 1992 Encyclopedia of the Early Church (Oxford University Press/James Clarke).