A review by judyward
The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why by Phyllis A. Tickle

3.0

Phyllis Tickle, who is the editor of the Religion Department of Publisher's Weekly, has written a thin, but information packed, book dealing with the evolution of religion in America and projecting its future development. Using the thesis that there is a great religious upheaval about every 500 years (we are about 500 years from the Protestant Reformation, 1,000 years from the Great Schism, 1,500 years from Gregory the Great, and 2,000 years from the emergence Christianity), she argues that Christianity is in the midst of another great upheaval and period of growth. Interestingly enough, she also comments that Jewish rabbis have pointed out that within Judiasm there also seems to be a 500 cycle. Five hundred years before the destruction of the Second Temple was the Babylonian Captivity and the Diaspora, and 500 years before that was the end of the Age of Judges and the establishment of the Hewbrew monarchy. This is an interesting examination of the state of Christianity in the United States today and a proposal of where Christians might find themselves in the next 50 to 100 years.