Illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the emergence, in the 3rd and 4th century AD, of striking new ideas about charity and how to include the poor inside a religious community.

Our focus today is his fascinating observations, in Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, on changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity