For God's eye: the surprising role of Christianity in great human accomplishment.

At rare times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. They have discovered truths about the way the universe works, written words that illuminate the human condition, arranged sounds and colors in ways that touch our deepest emotions. I have spent the last half-decade researching and writing a book about such achievements in the arts and sciences, beginning at 800 B.C. and stopping at 1950.

The experience was a humbling one. A colleague whom I asked to look at my treatment of great mathematical accomplishment was affronted that Carl Gauss had ranked merely fourth in my index of mathematicians. "It's a wee bit uncharitable," he wrote,