Profligation of Biblical Literacy Led to Ideological Trib...

Luther thought the result of his movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church would be what came to be called “the priesthood of all believers,” the sixteenth-century equivalent of Zuckerberg’s “global community.” In practice, the Protestant Reformation produced more than a century of bloody religious conflict. This was because new doctrines such as Luther’s, and later John Calvin’s, did not spread evenly through European populations. Although Protestantism swiftly acquired the structure of a...

 Tyrrany Sets Up Its Own Echo Chamber

I think it was Utz who first convinced me that history is always our guide for the future, and always full of capricious surprises. The future itself is a dead land because it does not yet exist. When a Czech writer wishes to comment on the plight of his country, one way open to him is to use the fifteenth-century Hussite Rebellion as a metaphor. I found in Prague Museum this text describing the Hussites' defeat of the German Knights: ''At midnight, all of a sudden, frightened shouting was he...