Michael P. Winship— In late 1535, 300-year-old Cleeve Abbey’s seventeen Cistercian monks received an emissary of King Henry VIII, the lawyer John Tregonwell. Like the rest of the monks, John Hooper, an Oxford University graduate in his late thirties, must have wondered why Tregonwell was really there. Was it because
Erika Helgen— Protestantism has a long, complex history in Brazil, full of starts and stops, growth and stagnation, political and social transformations. The earliest manifestations of Protestantism were short-lived. French and Dutch Calvinists who competed with the Catholic Portuguese for supremacy in the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth
Kathleen M. Sands— Recently, the Supreme Court decided about the forty foot “Peace Cross” that’s stood for nearly a century in Bladensburg, Maryland. For the American Legion, the Cross memorializes the dead of World War I; for American Humanists, it broadcasts an unconstitutional government preference for a particular religion.
In Francois Dubois’ painting of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, we see one of the worst acts of violence in the French Wars of Religion. Catholics attack the Huguenots, French Calvinist Protestants, in a number of horrific ways, bludgeoning some to death and decapitating others. According to modern