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“Sometimes I feel as though the empire were an unseaworthy boat; she brings leak leak in one place, you caulk it up, bail out and then before you can settle down to navigation, water comes spurting in somewhere else.��

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“Unpleasant associations are the seed of the church.��

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“The Church isn’t a cult for a few heroes. It is the whole of fallen mankind redeemed.��

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This one has been on my TBR since our pastor recommended it a few years ago. It is a beautiful fictionalization of the life of an ancient, towering example of a woman. She was responsible for the spread and acceptance of Christianity across the Mediterranean with her finding and venerating of the cross of Jesus. Her and her son had an unusual view of the world and way of comporting themselves for the time they were born.

I enjoyed the snippets of life we saw along the way for Helena, Constantine and Crispus although I would have loved for this story to be 100s of pages longer and given me more detail about her inner thoughts and how she came to see the world as she did. Her faith once present was unwavering and the idea that she had such power in the time she did was so inspiring.