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Pope Gregory XIII was patron of Rome’s renaissance, and a legal luminary whose influence transcends the ages.
Confession, circa 1460/1470. Artist unknown.
Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Churches’ struggles to respond to the plague and constant warfare in the 14th and 15th centuries helped shape the kinds of Christianity in the world today.
God creating night and day.
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Trump recently suggested that a vote for Biden would hurt God. Religion scholars explain what, in Christian theology, it would take to injure the creator.
Woodcut, circa 1400. A witch, a demon and a warlock fly toward a peasant woman.
Hulton Archive /Handout via Getty Images
The idea of organized satanic witchcraft was invented in 15th-century Europe by church and state authorities, who at first had a hard time convincing regular folks it was real.
A colorful Martin Luther figure, part of an exhibition in Germany, in 2017.
AP Photo/Jens Meyer
On Oct. 31, 1517, a German monk, Martin Luther, started the Protestant Reformation. Its impact went far beyond the split in the Church that most people are familiar with.
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the grim fate of Protestant clerics Latimer and Ridley, is one clue as to why Baldwin hesitated before publishing his irreverent book.
Wikimedia Commons
In the mid-16th century, William Baldwin wrote a satire on Catholicism but waited a decade before publishing it. Sensible man.
Illustration of Dante’s Paradiso.
Giovanni di Paolo
Different cultural groups respond with numerous, often conflicting, answers to questions about life after death. An expert explains the Christian idea of heaven.
LeventeGyori/Shutterstock.com
In the early 1900s, a group of Protestants in the US attempted a reunion of Christianity. They failed, of course, but they prompted a new dialogue.
Monument of Martin Luther in Eisleben, Germany, the town of his birth.
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Martin Luther’s Reformation resulted in Henry VIII making law changes which are still having an effect on today’s Brexit negotiations.
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In the great reformer’s eyes, if you didn’t love a rousing tune you deserved only “the music of the pigs”.
Luther’s act quickly came to be seen as the foundation of the Reformation, as shown in this centenary broadside, Göttlicher Schrifftmessiger, 1617.
Jfhutson, Wikipedia
Greed, guilt, fear, anger and love gave power to a spiritual movement that was catalysed 500 years ago this week.
Ferdinand Willem Pauwels/Wikimedia Commons
Just what are we celebrating when we imagine an Augustinian friar nailing a document to a church door?
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University degrees perform the same function in 2017 as indulgences did in 1517.
Nick Thompson/Flickr
Martin Luther has always given the country a chance to examine itself. Half a millennium on, the picture is more complex than ever.
Luther’s 95 Theses.
Ferdinand Pauwels, via Wikimedia Commons
On the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, two scholars explain how Luther’s personal and spiritual life contributed to his success.
Meet Jakob Fugger, the man who underwrote the ambition of power-hungry medieval Princes.
An exhibition for the Luther monument in Worms.
AP Photo/Jens Meyer
Luther translated the Greek New Testament into a common German dialect that ordinary people could read, without help from clergy.
Pope Francis giving a TED talk.
TED Conference
What Pope Francis did in his surprise TED talk was to relate the social message of Catholicism to people’s real lives.