Luther's Last Laugh: Journey to IndulGermania

Expositions, 2012

Journal of Early Modern History, 2012

David Hempton once wrote that, "like all great movements," Methodism "brought forth both intended and unintended consequences": Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven, 2005). In Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation, not only does this principle apply, but he argues through a genealogical approach that the Reformation movement(s) gave birth to modern society as we know it today. In this way, Gregory rejects a "supersessionist" model of historical change and instead affirms that the past is relevant to present realities (14). Moving beyond the domain of strict analysis, Gregory deftly critiques modern society for such circumstances as rampant moral subjectivism, consumerism with ramifications as serious as climate change, and the palpable incoherence and arbitrariness of a "whatever" culture in all its many webs. This endeavor is pursued in an impressively researched way, which is already generating discussion over the significance and relevance of the Reformation for today. In writing an historical account of the genesis of modernity, Gregory's book portrays the Reformation as a "critical watershed" (2); this is most persuasively shown in his incorporation of the radical Reformation as integral to the narrative, which helps correct Enlightenment narratives put forward by scholars like Jonathan Israel who claim that the Radical Enlightenment laid the foundations of the modern world. At the same time, Gregory also characterizes the Reformation as the "unintended" source of the eventual secularization of modern religion and society. Nevertheless, Gregory's approach highlights that, in many respects, the late medieval period bears critical responsibility for the development of modern society. Furthermore, his critiques of the Protestant Reformation frequently revive sixteenth-century Roman Catholic polemics without recognition of any strengths of the Protestant Reformation for Christianity and society, demonstrating that the points of contention from the past are still present today in a lively way. Circumventing the silos of academic disciplines and historical periodization, Gregory traces six selective threads including science, politics, and economics that span from the medieval period until today. While each is presented in a separate chapter, they are intended to be understood as part of the complex, interconnected root system of modernity. Accordingly, while each chapter begins with a descriptive of contemporary life, Gregory's genealogical approach singles out the Reformation as causative Copyright of Journal of Early Modern History is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2004

The English Historical Review, 2001

The Catholic Historical Review, 2012

Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 2019

This volume of papers resulted from a conference organized by the Italian-German Historical Institute to celebrate the 500 th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and included among its contributors, the founder of the Trento Institute (Prodi) and a former director (Seidel Menchi). The idea of the conference, as the co-editors announce in the Preface, is really to make the events of 1517 relevant to 2017 by giving the German Protestant Reformation a global perspective. To that end, the group of ten include five Reformation historians or at least scholars who focus on European history in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, four scholars representing the non-west European fields (on Russian Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism), and a specialist on religious studies and legal rights. Since the Holy Roman Empire was not in the forefront of voyages of exploration in early modern Europe, and the Reformation represented in many ways a return to an idealized past rather than a modern future, it is to be expected that the editors would invoke Max Weber as a link between religious reformation and modernity. That call was taken up in a way by the first paper, Wolfgang Reinhard's "Globalization of Religion?" The fact that Reinhard poses it as a question underlines his skepticism whether "religion" is a useful concept that can be applied to global civilizations. In his reflections on Weber, modernity, and on the quick survey of India, China, and the Islamic world, this essay reads more like an extended bibliographical note rather than a paper with a clear conclusion. The second paper by Prodi addresses the contemporary relevance of the Reformation. The title of his paper, "Europe in the Age of Reformations. The Modern State and Confessionalization", seems to echo a central concept argued by Reinhard and Schilling, but in fact, Prodi's paper, previously published, is altogether something else. "And as with all civilizations handing over the baton, it is not outside agencies that are killing the West, but the West killing itself." Such is one of the first sentences in Prodi's cri de coeur. For Prodi, the year 1517 created the modern state and religious confessions; and between discipline and sin, the homo europaeus struggled to find his liberty and create his modernity. With the collapse of these pillars supporting European society, the homo europaeus is in an existential crisis. While reminiscing about his own intellectual trajectory and on the history of the Italian-German Institute, Prodi issues remarkable statements: "I feel that Islam stemmed from a heresy that germinated within Christianity…" (p. 65), "the whole edifice of the West is collapsing" (p. 67), "multiculturalism has proved itself impotent and it remains to be seen if, and with what, we can replace the dialectic and distinction of powers which gave the West its identity during the confessional era" (p. 67). Even the editors must have been surprised; they described Prodi's paper as "characterized by an apocalyptic tone" (p. 10).

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 2018

The subject of this article is the crisis of Western culture (Christianity) in terms of its sources and consequences. The author attempts to present the diagnosis of European culture by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They associate its crisis with the internal weakness of Christianity (the Catholic religion) and the influence of philosophical trends and ideologies with the purpose of creating a "new culture" on the ruins of the old one. Postmodern thought, which not only breaks with the rationalism of the Enlightenment but questions (in the name of individual freedom) the truth and the ability to get to know it, plays a special role in this respect. The anti-Christian narrative adopted by intellectual elites in the West, which in some manifestations becomes an ideology of secularism, is thus a consequence of philosophical assumptions. The author suggests that the popularisation of a model of life according to the principle "as if God did not exist," i.e. the acceleration of de-Christianisation processes (e.g. in Poland) is significantly related to the development of the so-called new media, especially in the form of virtual reality.