A History of Christianity; The First Three Thousand Years (2010)

Most people will have neither the time nor the inclination to plow through Diarmaid MacCulloch's one-thousand page masterpiece The History of Christianity; The First Three Thousand Years (2009), but this masterful summary by the BBC makes for a wonderful substitute. I enjoyed watching the series in my adult Sunday School class. There are six DVDs, each of which is one hour long, and which features a surprisingly camera-friendly MacCulloch narrating the Christian story on location all around the world: The First Christianity, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, the Reformation, Protestantism and the Evangelical Explosion, and God in the Dock (secularism). Scholars will quibble about some details (no Aquinas or Mary in the episode on Catholicism?!), but this is a wonderful overview of the Christian story in all of its geo-political and theological variety by one of the world's best historians.