Embodied love meets empire in a fantastic history of friends and companions of Constantine the Great.

For readers age 9 to 90, this fast-moving adventure novel tracks the fantastic history of a diverse group of companions in their attempt to subvert the Roman Empire with justice and love. Grappling with the realities of war, violence and selfish ambition as they interface with peace, friendship and belonging, it investigates the potential of love as an alternative way of being.

Roger Haydon Mitchell has been a friend and consultant to the faith community, and also to the third, business and public sectors in the UK and Europe for more than forty years. He currently co-directs a small charity that advises such agencies on negotiating social change [www.2mt.org.uk]. Much of the focus of his work has been reconciliation between gender, generation and nation, and the role of the church as a reconciling community. As a result it became clear to him in 2005 that there was a pressing need to interrogate the interface between church and empire in the history of the West and he returned to his alma mater Lancaster University, where he studied with the supervision of the late Paul Fletcher and subsequently Gavin Hyman. His PhD thesis is now published as Church Gospel & Empire: How the Politics of Sovereignty Impregnated the West (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock 2011). Two further books build on the primary thesis, The Fall of the Church (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and Discovering Kenarchy (Wipf & Stock, 2014); essays from practitioners of the politics of love edited jointly with Julie Tomlin Arram. In 2018/19 he guest edited The Global Discourse Journal, subsequently published as Cultivating New Post-Secular Political Space (Routledge 2019).

For the last ten years Roger has been an honorary research fellow at Lancaster University, firstly in the Politics, Philosophy and Religion Department and then in the Sociology Department’s Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities. He has helped facilitate the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission since its inception in 2017 and is the lead editor of The Kenarchy Journal [https://www.kenarchy.org], an online academic journal in partnership with the Institute for Religion, Peace and Justice [https://www.irpj.org].

The context of much of Roger’s work has been the Pentecostal-Charismatic expression of faith. He is political theologian with the Westminster Theological Centre where he teaches an undergraduate course on Peace, Reconciliation and the Politics of Jesus and for the last seventeen years he has been the chair of trustees of Ashburnham Place, a prayer and conference community run in partnership with young international students. As well as the PhD in Religious Studies he has an MA in International Literature and Society 1910-45. He has authored or co-authored many other books and articles over the years, the best known of which are Target Europe (with Sue Mitchell; Sovereign World 2001), The Sins of the Fathers (with Brian Mills; Sovereign World 1999) and The Kingdom Factor (Marshall Pickering 1985).

Roger is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology, the Conflict Research Society, the Anabaptist Theology Forum, Pentecostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice, the Society for Pentecostal Studies and Christians on the Left.