Protestant or Catholic?
A debate that began about halfway through the 16th century continues to this day.
Martin Luther’s comfortable words
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore captures some of the beauty in Luther’s life.
Bring on hip-hop Erasmus
As Peter Berger said, humor posits its “effervescent” reality against the “dense, heavy, compelling” reality of the present.
Anglicans on the Wittenberg trail
It’s not the familiar narrative: four contented Anglicans, of the higher church variety, uninterested in conversion, walking in the footsteps of Luther.
500 years after Luther, the law/gospel insight remains almost true
Luther's understanding of the gospel has a tremendous liberating appeal, but also grave hermeneutical consequences.
The impulse to revise: The habit of American prayer books
Is prayer book revision a rational response to a current encounter? Or could this perhaps represent a more habitual response?
Wrestling with our past: Cranmer our brother
What do we do when we face parts of the past — or even among brothers and sisters today from far away — that strike us as uncomfortably strange?
Wrestling with our past: Cranmer, primitivism, and tradition
It’s not uncommon to slip into primitivism. A timeline often appears. A pure moment is imagined, a “golden age” with its simple, saintly figures.