stop. start. stutter.

It's Friday, so it's time for this week's Books About Cool Topics installment. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The Topic: Religious history: specifically, the Council of Nicaea
The Book: When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome by Richard Rubenstein

The Council of Nicea -- which is actually the First Council of Nicaea; there were others, but this is the one people most often mean -- is the point at which Christianity truly started to be shaped and codified. Before Nicaea, there were a bunch of different ways of looking at God and Jesus and the meaning of both, and individual churches taught and believed the version that they thought was most appealing. Rubenstein brings us through the argument (which actually displays surprising similarity to an Internet flamewar, although slightly more bloody-minded) providing just the right level of detail, and -- as is very rare for a book on religion -- without giving away which side of the debate he comes down on.

More than that, though, Nicaea was the story of Arius and Athanasius, the two main voices on both sides of the Christological debate, and Rubenstein gives us an excellent look at both men, their histories, their backgrounds, and their motivations, reconstructing very vibrant pictures of the two men from what's available to us today. This is a really good history book, well-researched and eminently readable, and very approachable for the layperson.