Faith through history

Jean Gerson (1363-1429)

Jean Gerson was a French theologian, scholar, educator, reformer and poet. His influence has been deep and lasting, mainly in two directions: his Conciliar views which found an echo in the many anti-Papal movements in Europe in the modern period, and his mystical teaching which was admired by Nicholas of Cusa, Ignatius of Loyola, Robert […]

Martin Luther (1483-1546)

Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, in the central German county of Mansfeld, and was baptized on 11 November, after the popular saint, St Martin. It was the wish of his father that Martin should take up the legal profession, and so after completing his schooling he began the study of […]

J.J. Thompson (1856-1940) Great are the Works of the Lord!

Joseph J. Thomson was an English Physicist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the electron. The properties of electricity and atom in the 19th Century was changed by the Findings of Thompson. Thompson was knighted in 1908. Rutherford was a student of Thompson. His professional life was based in Cambridge. His […]

Franceso Petrarch (1304-74)

Francesco Petrarca, commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was an Italian poet and humanist. His rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with inventing the 14th century Renaissance. Petrarch is often considered the founder of Humanism too. Because his father was in the legal profession, he insisted that Petrarch and his brother study law also. Petrarch however, […]

Dante Alighieri

Dante was an Italian poet and philosopher. Little is known of his early life except that he was born in Florence, lost his parents before he was 18, was betrothed at the age of 12 and married in 1293. In 1274 he first met his Beatrice (probably, Bice Portinai, the daughter of a Florentine citizen […]

Plato’s Chariot

Joseph Pallatty One of Plato’s recurring and overriding goals is to discover what it means to be just. In order to talk about how one should live he begins by talking about how our soul is constituted and what sort of relation the just man stands with in regards to his soul. According to Plato, […]

Renaissance Papacy

The Renaissance Papacy was a period of papal history between the Western Schism and the Reformation. It was a period of transformation in the style of the papacy. The popes now live securely in Rome. The challenge posed by conciliarism to papal authority ebbed out. The popes became somewhat identified with the Renaissance. Renaissance means […]

John Huss (c. 1372-1415)

John Huss (in Czech Jan Hus) was a Bohemian Reformer and was born of a peasant family at Husinec (whence the name Huss) in Bohemia, approximately the Czech Republic today. He was a student, and then a popular teacher at the recently founded University of Prague. Ordained priest in 1400, he was elected dean of […]

Hindus call off rally through Christian villages in eastern India

Dayal among three awarded for promoting religious freedom, civil liberties