Tag Archives: Reformation

The Russian Terrorist-Revolutionary Movement: 1866 – 1876

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 November 2025

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Meeting Protestants in Ukraine

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 May 2025

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Salem Witch Trials, Part Two: Hysteria and Persecution

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 January 2025

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Jews and the Russian Orthodox Church

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 October 2024

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When England Made Assassination Central to Foreign Policy

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 April 2024

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Murder, Martyrs, and Mystery: The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 August 2023

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The Trial of an English King

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 January 2022

“Judgement of Charles I,” by Ladislaus Bakalowicz, 1650

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The Confrontation that Began the Protestant Reformation

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 January 2021

“Luther at the Diet at Worms”, by Anton von Werner, 1877

The Diet of Worms convened 500 years ago today.[1] Four years earlier, Martin Luther had sent his Ninety-five Theses as part of a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, Albert of Brandenburg. The date on which Luther sent this letter, 31 October 1517, is now celebrated as “Reformation Day”, but the Reformation in a serious sense did not begin until after Luther was summoned before the 1521 Diet of Worms. Continue reading

America, Puritanism, and Hysteria

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 July 2020

The Witch (2016) is set in the Plymouth Colony, what is now the U.S. state of Massachusetts, in the 1630s. The focus is on Puritanism and the witch craze, subjects that are not entirely irrelevant at the present time. Continue reading

Book Review: The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) by Bernard Lewis

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 7, 2015

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With the triumph of relativism and the current economic woes of the West, the sense that Western civilization is unique and in some respects—to use an old-fashioned word—better than the alternatives, and worth defending and exporting, is waning. But Bernard Lewis’ The Muslim Discovery of Europe suggests a longer view in which Europe, while containing all the faults of previous civilizations, has been one of the few to begin the process of correcting those faults, and has corrected many more than any other civilization.

One feature of European civilization that stands out as unique is curiosity. Continue reading