Finished reading: Protestants : the radicals who made the modern world by Alec Ryrie 📚
Essential reading. An honest—brutally so, at points—recounting of Protestantism’s checkered history. A minor weakness is that Ryrie doesn’t devote much space to the late medieval context and the factors that contributed to the reformation. (Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation does a better job on this score.) That deficiency is more than made up for by the later sections of his book. As he moves to the “modern” and then “global” age of Protestantism, Ryrie’s account really picks up steam. The section on global Protestantism includes chapters on South Africa, Korea, China, and global Pentecostalism. Ryrie is definitely a historian to keep an eye on.