Twelve Churches : An unlikely history of the buildings that made Christianity

He brings together a Baptist Church in the segregationist American South with a medieval monastery in the heart of the Greek countryside; the Vatican—beautiful, imposing, vainglorious, the seat of Catholicism—with a sparse, tiny private church above the rocky coastline of Southern Japan.

Twelve Churches is a quest for a new people's history of Christianity, told through the stories of twelve churches scattered across the globe. Through a patchwork of interlinking and varied human stories, Butler-Gallie takes us on a physical and historical journey, exploring:

• The role of hope, faith, and beauty in Christianity
• Its fraught relationships with sex, violence, and power

The story of Christianity is, he shows, the story of our modern world: it's a story of who we should be, as well as who we sometimes are.