Next month marks the 499th anniversary of what is typically called the dawn of the Protestant Reformation.  On October 31st, 1517 Martin Luther pinned 95 theses to the Wittenberg castle-church door in the hopes of engaging other ecclesiastics in theological debate.  The theses were originally written in Latin, the theological lingua franca of the day.  His zealous students, however, seeing the value of a wider circulation, took the theses down, translated them into German—the local lingua vulgaris of the day—and rushed them off to this new thing called the “printing press.”  From there many copies could be made and disseminated, eventually, all over Europe. ...

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