Dad after God's Own Heart

We hear about it everyday in the news. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, LGBTQ, hetero-normative, Christians, Jews, Muslims, White Privilege, Male Privilege... We are no longer individuals trying to live our lives and not really aware of how every person that we meet and pass fits into society. We are now being forced into one category or another based upon not who we are, but where our existence can have the biggest effect for whatever the cause might be. I am not a man with a family trying to provide a reasonable existence for my said family, like myriad other family men. No, I get squeezed into categories like cis-gender, white privileged male, homophobe, and one of my favorites, Nazi! I howled at that one. It seems as though there is a special interest group out there for everyone except the people that don't care what color your skin is, how much money you have, what your religious or political leanings are. We used to b

As of late I have had a desire to learn more about the history of the Christian Church. I've been curious about the start and rise of Catholicism, the Reformation and even how the Crusades fit into everything. I am having a bit of trouble finding good reading materials on these subjects locally (I prefer a real book to electronic options), though I have not nearly exhausted my options yet. In my quest for information I have found and have been reading "The Triumph of Christianity" by Rodney Stark. It has been a really slow start to read that book. I think the reason being that as Stark discusses Paul's ministry, as well as others, I feel his theology is off. He seems to minimize the works of the Holy Spirit in Paul's ministry in particular, and bestows onto Paul what seem to be modern day understandings and psychology regarding how to reach the unreached, how to plan your journeys and how to choose whom you will preach to. This all led me to question the validit