Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

Brown, Peter. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 A.D. Princeton UP. Oct. 2012. c806p. illus. maps. bibliog. index. 9780691152905. $39.95 Well-known for his biography of Augustine of Hippo and his other works on religion in the era of late antiquity,  Brown's (history, emeritus, Princeton Univ.) newest work traces the establishment of the early Christian church and its tense, complicated relationship with money in the Western Roman Empire. Beginning just after the rule of the first Christian emperor Constantine and with extensive references from the lives and writings of major Christian writers, Brown traces the growth of the church and the evolution of what it meant to be a Christian in this era--in particular, the religion's gradual impact on the social ideas of privilege and philanthropy, and how these ideas affected the people of the empire in ways both material and spiritual.