In my journey through the history of divine power, I keep returning to one simple realization: every age relocates the sacred. Some peoples imagined the…
When the altars begin to break, the throne does not remain empty for…
Having widened the lens in the previous chapter, I return now to the Western road. Here, the struggle over divine power takes a form that will help shape…
When I picture myself inside a great cathedral, I understand how a sacred order can feel complete enough to erase the horizon. Stone, light, chant, and…
If classical antiquity often taught power to speak in the language of reason, law, and empire, the medieval world taught it to speak with even deeper…
Even after tracing the rise of monotheism, I find I must return to the painted colonnades of the Greek world. Historically and imaginatively, classical…
There is, to my mind, a kind of night that belongs especially to the desert. It is not the soft night of forests, where leaves and water seem to murmur…
As I leave behind the first altars, graves, and sacred landscapes of earlier human life, I find myself walking toward the stone geometry of the earliest…
When I try to follow the history of divine power back toward its beginning, I do not begin with kings, scriptures, or temples. I begin with people…
Words, it seems to me, can outlive the worlds that first gave them force. They pass from age to age like worn coins, their images half-erased but still…
I do not think this book began as an argument. It began, rather, as a wound so ordinary that at first I could not name…
