Rabble, Riots, and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized
Mike Aquilina (Ignatius, $23.50,206 pages)
Mike Aquilina is the best-selling author and president of the St. Pauls’ Center for Biblical Theology. His latest book, Rabble, Riots, and Ruins, is an examination of how a dozen famous ancient pagan cities were Christianized: Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, Ephesus, Edessa (Urfa, Turkey), Lugdunum (Lyon, France), Ejmiatsin, Constantinople, Milan, Ravena, and Carthage. Aquilina captures the distinctiveness of each ancient city and sometimes the book seems like a welcome travelogue for the distant past. More importantly, he illustrates how Christianity, when it penetrated the cities, radically changed them while preserving their best qualities. Jerusalem was chosen because of its importance to the Roman Empire and because it was the birthplace of Christianity, Rome because of its persecution of Christians, Ephesus because it where Jesus’s mother Mary reputedly spent her last days on Earth, and Ejmaistan because Armenia was the first officially Christian country. If there is a theme to the evangelization of these old cities is that the conversion took place after encountering the person of Christ and God’s saving graces through personal relationships. Aquilina in his afterward says that “one of the most important lessons we’ve learned from these cities … is that places ultimately don’t matter.” Several of them have vanished, although their influence (Ravenna’s art, Carthage’s Latin rite). Aquilina concludes that “maybe the most important lesson we can take from all this history, then, is to treasure our own traditions but to be flexible about them.”
