Year: 2009

He was born Philip Schwartzerd, a German name meaning “black earth.” But like many young scholars of the time, he showed his commitment to ancient learning by translating his name into Greek: melan = black, chthon = earth. Melanchthon intended to live the humanist scholarly dream, and had grand visions of fulfilling the Renaissance’s mission…

“The last pagans of the Western world,” said Czeslaw Milosz of his Lithuanian ancestry, adding that “Europe too, had her redskins.” With that politically incorrect comment, Milosz underlined how late Lithuania was to join the rest of Europe as a national member of Christendom. It was 1386: As historian Stephen Neill points out, Dante was…

Richard Allen (1760-1831) was the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His life story is remarkable (born into slavery, he bought his own freedom; rejected by the religious establishment, he distinguished himself as a minister of the gospel), but the best thing is that his story is available in his own words: The Life,…

Hugh (1096-1141) taught theology at St. Victor, which was the abbey of the Augustinian Canons Regular in Paris. Hugh began teaching there in 1125, just a dozen years after its founding by a disciple of Anselm of Canterbury. “Cathedra doctoris sacra Scriptura est,” said Hugh (an oft-quoted aphorism from his Miscellanies 1:75), which means literally…

He really fell for her, and I wish it were a wonderful love story, but it’s not. On February 10, 1751, John Wesley slipped on the ice on London Bridge, and hurt his ankle so badly that his next few sermons had to be delivered sitting down or kneeling. He chose to convalesce at the…

They burned him at the stake, and he knew it was coming. John Hooper (born around 1500 – martyred February 9, 1555) was the bishop of Gloucester in the sixteenth century. When the Church of England pendulum swung back towards Roman Catholicism under Mary, Hooper was predictably high on the list of people who would…