Diarmaid MacCulloch: A Story of Birth, Death & Rebirth

By Paul Lay | Published in History Today Volume: 59 Issue: 11 2009

A major new book and BBC television series tell the long, complex and often surprising history of Christianity. Writer and presenter Diarmaid MacCulloch talks about his huge undertaking with Paul Lay

Diarmaid Macculloch on location in China

Having written acclaimed studies of Thomas Cranmer, Edward VI and the European Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, is supremely qualified to write a history of Christianity. It is a subject he has been immersed in all his life.

‘I was a country parson’s son,’ he recounts. ‘I had a wonderful childhood in this ridiculous Tudor and Regency mansion in Suffolk. It really was Christendom. But it died while I was a boy.Which was sad because my dad was a good priest and I bought into the whole thing.’ Though few had as much engagement with the faith as MacCulloch, there was a time, not so long ago, when even the most sceptical of Britons shared a language inherited from Christianity so all pervasive that it was barely noticed, but much of this has disappeared. MacCulloch is very much aware of this.

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