Rudi moser biography of martin luther king
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Introduction
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a friar and Professor of Theology at the University of Wittenberg, Germany. While undertaking scriptural studies, Luther arrived at an essential tenet: the Bible alone was the source to salvation and true Christianity. Luther rejected the authority of the Pope, and thought that people should go to the church and pray, directly to God or Christ, and not to anyone who claimed special powers or holiness. On 31st October 1517, All Saints' Day eve, an occasion that attracted many pilgrims to the city, Luther fryst vatten said to have nailed 95 theses to the church door. These disputations, in Latin, were a provocative attack on indulgences, which he saw as a money-making scheme bygd the Church. Initially posted to generate scholarly debate, the theses marked a beginning on the Reformation timeline. Importantly, it was not only the theses that sparked the revolution; the time was ripe for action.
Luther was a preacher with a prol
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Today is the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. I decided to read some of his writings this week (with the 21st being the federal holiday in his honor), so I began with a book from which I have read large portions before today that I enjoyed. Yet the quotation that I want to ponder is not one I enjoy, so I chose to share it, because my reaction to Dr. King’s words were more defensive than usual. Let me share the quote, then I will tell you why I reacted less favorably that usual, then you can tell me your thoughts in the comments:
“Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt. The words ‘I will forgive you, but I’ll never forget what you’ve done’ never explain the real nature of forgivene
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A few weeks ago my wife found a copy of Time Magazine’s May 17th, 1963, issue in a used bookstore in Austin, TX. On the front of this issue was a picture of James Baldwin and inside the section called “The Nation” had a subsection on “Races” where this description of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. can be found on p. 23:
For more than a month, Negro demonstrations in Birmingham had sputtered, bursting occasionally into flames, then flickering out. Martin Luther King, the Negroes’ inspirational but sometimes inept leader, had picked this bastion of racial inequality for the crusade, “because Birmingham is the symbol of segregation.”
It was a very odd experience reading this 1963 article in 2013. Dr. King is a legend to us now. He is considered one of our nation’s prophetic voices. We have built a statue of him in Washington D.C. Our cultural memory has rightly enshrined him as a great man, but it may wrongly lead us to