A few days ago Elissa and I went to see Wittenberg performed by the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. The play by David Davalos is an intersection of the lives of the fictional Hamlet, Faust, and a fictional portrayal of Martin Luther. The play is too complicated and interwoven for me to pretend to have understood completely. What I was able to take away came from the juxtaposition of a religious and deep-thinking Luther against a rational and sardonic Faust. As the Luther character is challeged about his objections to the practices of the church and forced to defend them, I was better able to understand the internal difficulty he must have faced between his belief in both the bible and his investment in the institution of the church.

This evening on All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed Joseph Sisto on the private collection of manuscripts, some of them illegal, that his father John Sisto had amassed over his lifetime. The interview on NPR is fascinating in its entirety, but more so the end where Sisto tells Block about the contents of the collection as it concerns Martin Luther. "No doubt the historians are going to find things that will be revealed to the public that will be pretty interesting," he says, "For example The Reformation by Martin Luther is documented in some of those manuscripts, and some of the papal decrees, and so forth. The persecution of the Jews in Europe is documented in some of those manuscripts. And the sale of indulgences that Luther was against is documented and actually signed and sealed by the popes. So finally proof that it actually happened and not just a dispute between Luther and the pope of the time."

Follow link to Deeper Understanding of Martin Luther
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