Faith of Our Fathers

Why the Early Christians Still Matter and Always Will

By: Mike Aquilina

Narrated by: Greg Willits

Getting to know the Church Fathers means getting to know our own roots. It means knowing more deeply who we are as we learn more and more about who they are. The early Christians are our ancestors, our common genealogy, our family. When we look to our roots, what do we see?

That's what Mike Aquilina shows you in this book. The Fathers managed to pull off an amazing achievement. They converted the pagan world in a mere two and a half centuries. They did it without any resources, without any social or political power. They did it with the most primitive communications media. Yet their Church sustained a steady growth rate of 40 percent per decade over the course of those centuries. Maybe there's something we can learn from them. This book is a journey into that world, a tour where your guides are the Fathers.

©2012 Mike Aquilina (P)2013 Mike Aquilina

great life to share with those who hurt

loved it. buying book. may God bless you
I am buying the Twelve for gifts

feeling young again
faith comes to the elderly. nu

More about the Fathers with less sermon

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Not really time well spent. I wanted information about the "Fathers" of the church; I feel that I could have gotten much more from a book that focused on the Fathers.

Any additional comments?

The sermon and reading list of the last two sessions had little to do with the Fathers.

Places the Fathers in Context

This is a shorter book that is a more historical description of early Christians and the challenges they faced as opposed to early church theology. I found it complimentary to "When the Church Was Young".

You will not learn a great deal on any church father, but what you know about the early church fathers will be enriched by understanding them in a deeper historical context.

Fine for beginners, but needs meat

After the first few chapters about the Church fathers the subjects range almost aimlessly, like someone trying to pad the content. It's all still educational and fascinating, but detracts from the book's cohesion and feels more like a compilation of church pamphlets, the kind you can get at the door by the handful. The author also name-drops so many books and authors, it feels more like a catalog than a book in its own right.

The narrator's showroom voice doesn't help either. There's no sense of weight to the seriousness of the topics, which makes it hard to ignore minor pronunciation errors.

The Early Church

Useful history on the Early Church.
Practices still used in the Mass to this day.