Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History
and Religious Studies
Since 1979, I have published twenty-four books, about a hundred book chapters and refereed articles, and over a hundred book reviews.
You can find a listing of reviews of my books here.
Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses (HarperOne, 2011).
The Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (HarperOne, 2010).
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia - and How It Died (HarperOne, 2008).
God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
"A sweeping survey at least partly aimed at defusing the kind of frenzied rhetoric found in While Europe Slept. Jenkins' elegant and fluid writing never allows the text to be bogged down by the data. Beyond being an eye-opener for general readers and an invaluable resource for academics, the book injects a much-needed voice of reason into the cacophony of outsized opinions on the topic."
Catholic Online
"Jenkins loves to skewer headlines, to the point that each new book seems to present nothing less than a paradigm shift.... And who but Jenkins could enliven this storyline with an ocean of sociological data poured into a novel-like book that's impossible to put down?"
Religion Bookline
The New Faces of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
"An important new book by one of the preeminent scholars of contemporary Christianity. Perhaps more than any other church historian in the affluent north, Philip Jenkins understands how the church of the global South will transform Christian faith in the world. The New Faces of Christianity challenges our usual reading of the Bible with profound insights from Christians who help us re-learn truths that much of Western Christianity has forgotten. Like his ground-breaking The Next Christendom, this is absolutely essential reading for all who are seeking to understand the future of the church in the 21st century."
Jim Wallis, Editor of Sojourners and author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It
"Jenkins's prescient religious histories offer brilliant insights on the state of modern Christianity."
Publishers Weekly
"Gracefully and cogently synthesizing mountains of research, Jenkins illuminates a crucial aspect of the burgeoning 'Two-Thirds World' Christianity that he called attention to in The Next Christendom."
Booklist
Decade of Nightmares (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
