New Book Announcement: “Constantine and the Divine Mind”

I’m happy to announce that my forthcoming book, Constantine and the Divine Mind: The Imperial Quest for Primitive Monotheism, has just been picked up by Wipf and Stock publishers.

What’s the book about?  Essentially, it’s a new historical proposal about the reason for Constantine’s famous conversion to Christianity. It’s also about monotheism.

Few subjects seem to have posed a bigger challenge to historians of Rome and early Christianity than Constantine’s relationship with the Christian religion.  Indeed, the emperor’s dramatic turn to the Christian god remains one of history’s most controversial and hotly-debated episodes: Was Constantine’s conversion “sincere”?  If so, why did he convert?  When did this conversion take place?  And what kind of Christian did he ultimately become?

I won’t spoil anything just yet, but I’ll say this much: in Constantine and the Divine Mind, I will be offering a new portrait of Constantine as a deeply religious man who believed he was on a divine quest to restore the original religion of mankind.  By tracing this quest, I will be illuminating the process by which he embraced the Christian god, and how the reasons for that embrace continued to manifest in his religious policies.

The book’s foreword will be written by historian Joseph Early Jr., PhD, associate professor of religion at Campbellsville University, and the author of A History of Christianity (Baker Academic, 2015) and many other books and articles.

If you are at all interested in Christianity, Roman history, monotheism, the psychology of religious conversion, or the challenge of religious diversity, then this book will have something for you.  Be on the look-out for updates, including a release date, as the manuscript edges closer to completion.

For now, here are some photos of myself and Constantine, who I feel I’ve come to know personally over the past few years of research: