Kingdoms of This World

There is no scholar of religion writing today who has more of a right to say that the world is his parish than Philip Jenkins.  Kingdoms of This World ranges dazzlingly across the centuries, the continents, and the major religions. The result is not only insightful, but breathtaking.

~Timothy Larsen, author of  The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith

With trademark magisterial mastery of world history, Philip Jenkins offers a sweeping view of the mutual impact between empire-building and the making of religions. While much has been written on the collusion between Christianity and empires,  Kingdoms of This World expands scholarship by examining other religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and shows not only how empires have made and remade religions but also how religions resisted empires. A significant addition to empire literature.

~Peter C. Phan, The Ignacio Ellacuria, SJ Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Georgetown University

If polite conversations should avoid both religion and politics, Philip Jenkins has upset convention to show, in a luminous account, the deep inner connections between politics at its broadest (empire) and almost everything having to do with faith. Although the book includes captivating discussion of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim empires, it features even more perceptive consideration of Christianity and empire (as in one brilliant example: 'The Palestine of Jesus' day was a palimpsest of empires, past and present').  Kingdoms of This World is a wide-ranging but always lucid examination of a reality as vast as it is important.

~Mark Noll, author of  America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911

Empires have been the default setting of political organization throughout the ages. As such, their history is interwoven with the formation and expansion of the world's great religions in intricate and ambiguous patterns. Philip Jenkins' book, founded on an extraordinary range of reading, uncovers those patterns with rare insight and comprehensiveness. This work demands the attention of scholars of both religion and imperialism, and of all those who wish to understand the religious and ideological contours of the modern world.

~Brian Stanley, Professor Emeritus of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh

When in a previous generation the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote  A Study of History to review the rise and fall of empires, he became increasingly convinced that religion formed a key to understanding the process. Now he has a successor, Philip Jenkins, who in this book analyzes the ways in which world faiths have related to successive empires. Jenkins, however, is much more convincing than his predecessor because he builds on the extensive work of many recent scholars. The result is a magisterial overview of the interactions of empire and religion in recorded history.

~David Bebbington, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Stirling

Kingdoms of This World covers a stunningly broad scope of religions and empires to demonstrate the tragic and interdependent relationships between them. This is an ideal model of scholarship in the global history of religions.

~Thomas S. Kidd, Research Professor of Church History, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Drawing on deep wells of learning, Philip Jenkins addresses a notable gap in the literature of the history of religions: a synoptic overview of the interrelations between religion and empire. Jenkins illuminates the changing fortunes of various religions by showing how they were shaped by their imperial matrices. In a book of great geographical and chronological span Jenkins draws telling comparisons and contrasts between the religions of the East and West.  Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions provides a new vantage point for understanding religions as a global phenomenon.

~John Gascoigne, Professor Emeritus, University of New South Wales

This, it seems to me, is a perspective more conducive not only to promising new fields of inquiry for scholars of religion but, ultimately, to more fruitful engagement between faith and politics than forced efforts to reduce the rich tapestry of human history and the experience of believers of all kinds through the ages to hackneyed morality tales about "speaking truth to power."

~Bonnie Scott, The Living Church