What is Religion?: European Thought from Antiquity to the Present

How should we explain differences in religious belief and practice? Philippe Borgeaud's ambitious intellectual history tells the story of how reflection on religious phenomena emerged, throughout the centuries, in European consciousness and scholarship. Christianity in particular, as Borgeaud shows, long wrestled with how to understand polytheistic cultures versus its own belief in a single omnipotent God. The Church Fathers, the author argues, sought to inherit the core of Graeco-Roman cul...