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When England’s Reformation began, only a small band of idealists – or fanatics – truly wanted a Protestant England. Nevertheless, within a single lifetime, they achieved it.
The English Reformation – unlike many of the other Reformations convulsing sixteenth-century Europe – was at heart more about politics and law than about religion.
Most English people initially saw the Reformation as an unexpected catastrophe, wrenching their religious lives out of shape, and stripping their communities of resources they had naively believed belonged to them.
London in the 1950s and 60s was a crucible in which West Indian writers, artists, thinkers and scholars imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the world.
Eve was the original Evil Woman. She was tempted by Satan, introducing sin into the world. In turn, she seduced Adam, bringing the wrath of the Creator upon humanity for all eternity.
England’s Catholic Reformation is the reformation that sixteenth-century England nearly had: a reformed and renewed English Catholic Church, its new schools and revived parishes matched with a firm smack of discipline.
The story of the Mayflower is usually presented as a tale of persecuted Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in circumstances of grave adversity to inhabit a desolate wilderness.
This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial “superintelligence”, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us.
This final lecture will ask why it suits each age to select, reinvent and suppress different parts of the history of religious atrocity, and why some victims, such as Anabaptist radicals, remain neglected down to the present.