Curated playlist
People celebrated in the Lutheran liturgical calendar
- RembrandtThe Night Watch, Rembrandt's most famous painting, is not set at night. Its darkness comes from aging.
- MichelangeloMichelangelo said he lived like a poor man, yet he was worth about 50,000 gold ducats.
- Nicolaus CopernicusThe first attacks on Copernicus came from Protestants, not the Catholic Church.
- Martin Luther King Jr.Martin Luther King Jr. died at the age of 39, yet his autopsy showed the heart of a 60 year old, according to his biographer Taylor Branch. Branch attributed the damage to stress. The causes were many. King was jailed repeatedly, attacked…
- Johann Sebastian BachFor decades after he died, Bach was remembered as an organist, not a composer.
- NoahNoah's flood story matches an older Mesopotamian tale point by point.
- OrigenIn 543, Emperor Justinian I declared Origen a heretic and ordered his writings burned.
- John CalvinJohn Calvin called his own central teaching a decree dreadful indeed. He preached it anyway.
- Leonhard EulerLeonhard Euler kept producing math after going almost totally blind. In 1775 he wrote about one paper a week.
- John WesleyJohn Wesley thought saving souls outside a church was almost a sin. In 1739 he preached in a brickyard anyway.
- Mary MagdaleneThe English word maudlin, meaning sickeningly sentimental, comes from the way painters showed Mary Magdalene weeping. The woman behind that word left no writings of her own. She is never mentioned in any of the letters of Paul or in the…
- Thomas CranmerThomas Cranmer thrust his right hand into the flames first. He said it was punishment for signing his recantations.
- Martin LutherMartin Luther married a nun who had been smuggled out of her convent in herring barrels.
- Francis XavierFrancis Xavier died within sight of China, a country he never reached. He had once been a high-jumper in Paris.
- Albrecht DürerAlbrecht Dürer drew a rhinoceros he had never seen. His 1515 woodcut still appeared in some German school textbooks.
- Bartolomé de las CasasBartolomé de las Casas began as a slave owner with a gold-rich estate on Hispaniola.
- William TyndaleWilliam Tyndale's last words asked God to open the King of England's eyes.
- MetatronThe angel Metatron is named nowhere in the Bible, yet he became a major figure in Jewish mysticism.
- Søren KierkegaardSøren Kierkegaard invited a satirical newspaper to attack him, and it did.
- Harriet TubmanHarriet Tubman, born Araminta Ross, never forgot the moment she first felt free. Years later she described it this way: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory…
- Florence NightingaleFlorence Nightingale broke into locked storage with a hammer to reach medicine for the wounded.