Protestant Reformation Quotes

In the eyes of the Associated Press, American Christianity, which springs from the Protestant Reformation, is fundamentalist. And Christian Fundamentalists, radical Muslims, Hindu extremists, and fanatical Zionists are all the same - bloodthirsty lunatics.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times. And so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

The Protestant reformation was an attempt to recast the Christian faith in terms of the new learning of the 16th century, the enlightenment learning. It was the first time that the Christian church did not have the capacity to keep itself unified as it recast itself, so it split into Protestant and Catholic traditions.

[Pope Francis] most recent trip was to Sweden, where he commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. That had triggered one of the biggest splits in Christianity and decades of religious wars. He went so far as to praise Luther, who was once considered a heretic in the church, as a great reformer. So what he's been doing with other Christian churches is trying to heal past wounds and work together toward a shared view of their history.

We don't have to go around as the Protestant reformation did, or as the socialist revolution did, and execute each other as soon as we are successful - assuming we'll ever be successful.

What we argue in the piece is that the headscarf has become a political symbol for an ideology of Islam that is exported to the world by the theocracies of the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just like the Catholic Church in the 17th century did religious propaganda to challenge the Protestant Reformation, these ideologies are trying to define the way Muslims express Islam in the world.