When Martin Luther decided to nail those 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517 he was doing much more than coming up with some thoughts on how the church was being run. One thing he did was get in big-time trouble from Pope Leo X who died on December 1, 1521. Leo X …

When Henry II was king of England way back in the 1100’s he began the efforts to curb the power of the clergy and begin to pull away from the influence of the Pope and Rome. He held a conference called the Constitutions of Clarendon on 16 articles that set forth what these restrictions on the church would be and …

King Henry VIII’s desire for divorce can’t be overstated when we discuss how the Bible was put together and how the Protestant Reformation came about in England. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was very powerful in King Henry’s court and held influential government offices while he served as Cardinal – and Archbishop of York. His home near London is called Hampton Court …

Baptist Churches in the US seem plentiful but the first one organized in Poland happened on November 28, 1858. William Weist baptized 8 people in the town of Stolzenberg (which is now called Rozanki) in what at that time was in Prussia which is in Poland today. Don’t look for Stolzenberg, Prussia on Google maps because it isn’t there. This …

History has shown us one of the best ways to cure rivalries is to have a common enemy. As the influence of the papacy grew in the middle ages, and as kings and emperors sought/fought for power, there was a great deal of infighting within Christianity. But Pope Urban II on November 27, 1095, solidified Christians when he began the …

My guess is you’ve never heard of Isabella Van Wagener unless she used her more famous name Sojourner Truth. When she died on November 26, 1883, in Battle Creek, Michigan, she had become world-famous for her evangelism and women’s rights efforts. She had a quick tongue and once told a man who was arguing that women had no role in …

Cambridge and Oxford are two of the most recognized universities in the world but from 1660 to the mid-1800s, the only people allowed to enroll had to members of the Church of England. For those who were “non-conformists,” they attended what was known as dissenting academies and one was established in a London community called Newington Green. The Newington Green …

On November 24, 1880, the Rev. W.W. Colley lead 150 fellow African Americans to form the Baptist Foreign Missions Commission at a convention in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2013 the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Missions Board named its International Learning Center in Rockville, VA after Colley.

I have no idea what I may be remembered for but I can promise you it won’t be for my math skills. Blaise Pascal, however, does get that credit which happens when you create a calculating machine in 1652. He was brilliant in not only mathematics but also physics and literature. On November 23, 1654, he became a Christian in …

The world most likely remembers November 22, 1963, as the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated but it was also the same day two very different British writers died: Aldus Huxley and C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis’ journey was from atheist to one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time. His work Mere Christianity continues to be widely read, …