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On this final episode of the second season, we tell the story of monasticism, which is one of the tension between living a life of authentic dedication and finding out there’s a lot of earthly reward for doing so. There are also many conclusions that can be made from this story when we compare these monks to modern church leaders.

We’re leaving continental Europe to travel to Britain and Ireland. These two islands experienced less interaction with the Roman Empire and so their path to Christianity looks different than places inside the empire’s boundaries. 

We’ll talk about how Christianity became popular in both places, share the stories about their most famous heroes (hint: one of them has one of the most popular saint’s days in the world), and explore the unique parts of their practice and tradition.  And as wandering Irish monks leave Ireland to travel around Europe, we’ll find some threads that bring us back to other episodes this season.

We’ve been in the heat of drama talking about Kngs and the King of Kings on this second season of Church Historia, but today's episode is a re-run from Season 1. In this episode we talk about civil religion and how it expresses itself in the United States. This conversation is important because American civil religion uses a lot of language that sounds similar to Christianity (e.g. God, Almighty, called to a specific purpose), but it is its own thing, with its own stories, symbols, rituals, and heroes. We believe that talking about civil religion and learning how it relates to Christianity and patriotism is important for us to have greater clarity about each of those things and to help us, as individuals, better understand our motivations and beliefs.