Greg Sheridan is a household name in Australia. For over thirty years now, he has been the country’s leading foreign affairs journalist. He is also a Catholic and has produced a book on how we Christians can reconquer the culture of the world if we just have the courage and intelligence to learn a few lessons from St. Paul and other early Christians.
What to do about the culture wars is a contemporary hot topic. There are many books on the subject, including one about abiding the long defeat like a family of hobbits. What is distinctive about Sheridan’s book is that it is written by someone trained to study political behavior and the sequence of the unfolding of events in history. He makes the point, for example, that while the disciples did transform great cultures, they did so almost always one person at a time. Authentic Christian witness was what overcame the paganism of the ancient world—not some genius marketing strategy.
The book is divided into two parts. The first is titled ‘The Revolutionary Christians of the Early Church’ and the second is titled ‘Contemporary Early Christians’. The second part profiles contemporary evangelizers who are successful at this work of turning one life around at a time. One of the stars in this section is Bishop Robert Barron, but Sheridan profiles many others who have crossed his path. They are people who are not remotely famous, just unsung Christians changing the lives of those they encounter and bringing others to Christ through the authenticity of their faith.
My favorite chapter was the second of part one, which begins with the observation that “no cultural influencer, in this case no Christian missionary, in all history, has been more successful than Saul of Tarsus, whom the world knows now as Saint Paul.” Sheridan turns Paul into something more multi-dimensional than the standard, pious shop holy card of an old man with a long grey beard, holding a book in one hand and a sword in the other.
He explains that St Paul was a deeply learned Jew of Pharisee inheritance. Paul knew the Hebrew Scriptures and he was fluent in Greek. Quite simply, he had mastered the Jewish, Greek, and Roman worlds. He was ‘the first sophisticated city intellectual among the early Christians, the first, great, Christian cosmopolitan’. Having heard so many homilists extol the rustic background of St. Peter, it is a refreshing change to come across someone who thinks that St. Paul’s high education was an asset to the apostolic band.
The chapter on St. Paul also includes a study of St. Lydia. Although she is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles as St. Paul’s first convert in Philippi, few homilists ever spend much time on her. Sheridan, however, makes the point that it appears she was the head of her own household, a businesswoman, and a person of some means. From the fact that all Christians are in her debt for establishing the first Christian church in Europe, Sheridan concludes that ‘no audience is too small, or apparently too uninfluential’. If St. Paul had not spoken at the synagogue on the day that Lydia was present, Christian history may be quite different.
Sheridan seems to follow the Cleopatra’s nose theory of history–that the small details matter. If Cleopatra had a differently shaped nose, Mark Antony may not have taken much interest in her, and if St. Paul had not preached to Lydia, the church of the Philippians may not have come into being.
For his younger readers, Sheridan also explains that when St. Paul was offered a chance to speak at the Areopagus, “this was like being invited onto primetime TV for the first time or getting to sing at Carnegie Hall or the Sydney Opera House, or being interviewed on the biggest podcast you can imagine.” Once on the largest stage of the ancient world, St. Paul pulled no punches. He was not tempted to dilute any of the Christian teachings to make them sound less ridiculous.
As Sheridan remarks, he did not focus on Christians’ charitable works and generous giving or other elements of the Christian package that sing in tune with the signs of the times. Instead, he dared to talk about bodily resurrection.
The third chapter of the first part deals with the conversion of Corinth, the home of the cult of Aphrodite, who was the goddess of sex. Here Sheridan observed that in ancient Greek parlance, the verb to “Corinthianise’ meant to have sex, and ‘Corinthian girls’ was a polite expression for prostitutes. Corinth was something like the Las Vegas of the ancient world, the seediest of the most seedy of towns. Women who were degraded by this anti-culture naturally found Christianity attractive. It gave them an intrinsic dignity and elevated the status of marriage and sexual intimacy. As Sheridan notes, “marriage went from being the way a virile man reproduced himself and ensured his own immortality to an institution of mutual love, between two adults, committed to each other for life, entered into voluntarily by both parties, with children as a purpose and consequence.”
However, the increase in the number of female Christians was not due to this alone, but to the fact that the Christians, unlike the pagans around them, were not aborting or abandoning baby girls. They even adopted baby girls abandoned by other families. As the girls grew to maturity, they sometimes married pagan men and converted them.
Yet another interesting sociological observation from the book is that in times of plague, the Christians were known to support one another, not to run away and hide and leave the sick to die alone in misery. They nursed the sick, and some of those who had caught whatever plague was doing the round then developed immunity, recovered their health, and carried on the task of building strong Christian families.
Overall, the book is an encouragement to all those Christians who are doing their best to just keep calm and carry on. It is also filled with historical facts that would be especially enlightening for younger readers whose knowledge of ancient history and culture may not be strong.
This will make a good Christmas stocking book for teenagers, godchildren, undergraduates, and older friends who may appreciate something that is both engaging and hopeful.
How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church
By Greg Sheridan
Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2025
Paperback, 393 pages
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It’s become quite clear to me that Satan has thoroughly embedded himself into our culture. Don’t take my word for it; just look around, scour the internet, read the news, look at our educational and medical establishments. Look at our cities: New York, Seattle, Portland, Washington, Chicago, LA. Satan dominates. I’ve concluded (and it’s something that no one ever seems to mention) that what we need is the intervenion of exorcists because our culture is possessed. Yes, we have exorcisms of individuals but, let’s face it, Satan can take hold of large swaths of our culture which work together toward evil ends. We need the Church’s power of exorcism to publicly send Satan out from our culture. These need to be public events – preferably perforned by bishops.
Then we need to set about the work of proclaiming Christ to the culture. Large convocations-again bishops inviting the culture to come to Christ who desires to rescue them from the clutches of Satan and to be restored to wholeness and holiness.
This is something Catholics can do…must do. Why? Christ commanded us to do it. Bring home the lost sheep of our culture away from Satan under whose control they are.
Both/and: the Bishop Robert Barrons and the John Does.
No Christian tool in all of history was successful like TLM ad33-1962.
What went wrong?
Answer that question, and understand that SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM started righting the wrong so successfully the 68-ers bulldozered it again with Traditionis Custodes.
Full youthful churches are being re-emptied, with thousands of Catholics turned out of Parish churches without the Mass of the Ages.
Until Rome acknowledges the impasse of Post-Conciliarism, Western Civilisation will continue its with its present disease: TLM starvation.
Greg is a regular contributor to The Australian newspaper. I and many others enjoy his articles on the Catholic faith in relation to current and historical events. At a time when our tolerant secular society increasingly seeks the need to cancel Christianity, Greg always manages to speak the truths of our faith.
Thank you, dear Professor Tracey Rowland for a great review of a great book.
We read that St. Paul was “the first sophisticated city intellectual among the early Christians, the first, great” Christian cosmopolitan”. And, even more than that.
Four points:
FIRST, as Benedict XVI puts it, Christianity is unique in that it is more grounded not in the mysticism of the Eastern mystery religions, but in human reason and philosophy, largely because St. Paul providentially crossed over into Macedonia. The coherence of faith and reason; categorically more than “cosmopolitan”.
SECOND, alternatively, later Arabian Islam became cosmopolitan when in the 8th Century the Arabs conquered non-Arab Persia, and is distinguished by its replacement of human reasoning with closed-loop Qur’anic rationalizations. Human reasoning is expelled as blasphemy because it seems to establish an autonomy separate from the autonomy of God who alone is great.
THIRD, in this context—faith and reason—Sheridan’s book challenges Christians to overcome the derailment in the West ever since the autonomous Enlightenment enabled all that’s wrong in our post-Christian, rationalistic[!] and ideologically secularistic (not merely secular) culture.
FOURTH, about Sheridan’s “Cleopatra’s nose theory of history,” how different would world history be if Muhammad’s initial and likely epileptic experiences at the age of forty (410 A.D.) in the cave at Mt. Hira had NOT been misinterpreted to him as revelations of “the Law” from the Angel Gabriel–by the consulted and somewhat Jewish-Christian cousin of Muhammad’s wife, Kadijha. The rest, as we say, is history. The Butterfly Effect of one conversation!
typo: (610 A.D.)
Peter: as to Cleopatra’s nose theory, isn’t all existence predicated on a long chain of chance encounters or interactions?
(continued) Got cut off…
THIRD, after all, the extraordinary coherence of faith and reason (a Judeo-Christian “progress,” not secular/atheistic) is branded as either “backwardist” in the West, or by Islam as a blasphemy within polytheistic (triadic) Christianity—as a deformation of the prior and original Islam. “There is not a child that he or she is born upon this ‘fitrah,’ this original state of the knowledge of God. And his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian . . . and if they are Muslims, Muslim” (from the Hadith as reported by Bukhari; Sahih, I 34).
FOURTH, is ahistorical Islam better understood through cultural anthropology than through (interreligious) theology or a presumed parallelism of scriptures (the Qur’an and the Bible)? The symmetrical—apples to apples—comparison is between the artifact Qur’an (“the word made book”) and the concrete Incarnation (“the Word made flesh”)—as the center of universal human history. Singularly more than a narrative.
This remark FOLLOWS my posting below stamped two minutes earlier.
The genius of the Church was Traditional Latin, Greek, and Araméen Mass. Three sacred languages – associated directly with the Christ – used exclusively down to the 9th century.
A return to the early genius would begin there: just as Hebrew was the language of Worship for the old covenant, so the triptych logos witnessed on the cross of Christ became the exclusive languages of sacred liturgy.
And lets be honest. The early genius was alive and well ad33-1962. We dont need archelogy to reinstate Summorum Pontificum and re-release the logos.
I tend to think so, except for the divinely aided trajectory of the Chosen People through the Old Testament and into the New, with the Old foreshadowing the New and the New (the Incarnation) fulfilling the Old. For as long as it takes, we are now living in the “end times.” And, the Apostolic Succession will always be an inconvenient mystery to whichever ideological narrative is favored by the stars, or Cleopatra’s nose, or the Butterfly Effect.
Four points, since you ask (!):
FIRST, all the rest of history(ies) is identity politics and narratives…including the overarching and unquestioned periodization of history—as in Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern (ourselves!). As if Technocracy is some kind of ontological breakthrough, instead of C.S. Lewis’ “chronological snobbery.”
SECOND, Jacob Burckhardt–coiner of the term “Renaissance” (in his “Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,” 1855) also remarked of more olden times: “if they were able to die for one another, we have not progressed
Saint Paul in Scripture tells to “Fight the good fight.” In today’s spiritual warfare which hits us even in our homes through the mass media and the internet it is very important for each of us to put on the full armor of God. We must pray, pray, pray. The Holy Rosary is our are most important weapon given to us by Heaven itself. Another important prayer the Divine Mercy Chaplet given to us by Saint Maria Faustina Kawalska. I encourage you the read the Divine Mercy Diary by Saint Faustina. Next to the Holy Bible it’s one of the most important books ever written. It’s basically over 600 pages of a conversation with Jesus Christ and Saint Faustina. It should be a must read for all Catholics.