January 21, 1521: Black Earth and First Mass

Frederick, the elector of Saxony, is enduring pressure from Pope Leo X to banish Martin Luther from his lands. But Frederick's sympathies toward Luther leave him agonized. Today, he finds himself in the same room as the pope's allies. A donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Minist ...  Show more

As his students gather around him, Martin Luther answers their questions and plays along with their goading. But when the professor starts to tell of his miraculous conversion, the room is marked by an awed silence. Listen along today--500 years later. A donor-supported outreach ...  Show more

“The Mass is the greatest blasphemy of God, and the highest idolatry upon earth, an abomination the like of which has never been in Christendom since the time of the Apostles.” - Martin LutherIn the year 1517, a young Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther nailed his 95 Th ...  Show more

Martin Luther is one of the few people to have genuinely changed the world, igniting a religious revolution that tore Christendom in two, and undermined European tradition in ways that still reverberate today. But along with Luther’s uniquely tortured psyche, three events contrib ...  Show more

"I cannot and will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.…Here I stand, I can do no other” The Diet of Worms in April 1521 was one of history’s most dramatic confrontations, a clash of the old world and the new. It saw the celebrity professor ...  Show more

“I think there is not a devil left in hell, they have all gone into the peasants… smite, stab and slay all”.  Following on from Martin Luther’s dramatic abduction by his powerful protector, Frederick III, he had been secretly kept safe at Wartburg. There, he abandoned his priestl ...  Show more