Justification and Merit: Luther vs. Catholicism

Catholicism and Democracy A Reconsideration

[1] It has long been believed that there is a relationship between a society‟s culture and its ability to produce and sustain democratic forms of government. The ancient Athenians maintained that their democracy depended, in part, on the fostering of “civic virtue” or democratic culture. Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and J. S. Mill also maintained that culture and democracy were related, ...

Unenglish and unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality.

ESPITE THE TRADITIONAL teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is always sinful, there are grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that have been particularly attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority. This apparent connection between Anglo-Catholicism and the male homosexua...

Spirituality and Catholicism: The Italian Experience

At the start of the twenty-first century, Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality, 5 carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in spirituality, that they might describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and that they privilege the ‘god within’ rather than the transcendent...

Current Issues and Trends in Luther Studies

Bad for Business: Luther Against the Papacy

This paper analyzes Martin Luther’s criticism of increasingly corrupt church practices, including, the papacy’s granting of indulgences, the promotion of pilgrimage, the preservation and exploitation of relics, the cult of saints, and the belief in saintly intercession. I will examine how Luther’s critiques of these practices were expressed in the religious propaganda that circulated during thi...