John Calvin (1509–1564) was an influential French theologian and pastor
during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the
development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism.
Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he suddenly broke from the
Roman Catholic Church in the 1520s. After religious tensions provoked a
violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel,
Switzerland, where in 1536 he published the first edition of his
seminal work Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin was mainly
based in Geneva where he promoted reforms in the church. He introduced
new forms of church government and liturgy, despite the opposition of
several powerful families in the city. Calvin's writing and preaching
provided the seeds for the branch of theology that bears his name. The
Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, which look to Calvin as a
chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world.
Calvin's thought exerted considerable influence over major religious
figures and entire religious movements, such as Puritanism, and his
ideas have been cited as contributing to the rise of capitalism,
individualism, and representative democracy in the West.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1553:
Four days after the death of her predecessor, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey
was officially proclaimed Queen of England, beginning her reign as the
"The Nine Days' Queen".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Jane_Grey>
1796:
German mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss discovered that
every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three
triangular numbers.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss>
1800:
Lord Wellesley, Governor-General of the British Raj, founded Fort
William College in Fort William, India, to promote Bengali, Hindi and
other vernaculars of the subcontinent.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_William_College>
1941:
The Holocaust: Approximately 40 non-Jewish ethnic Poles from around the
nearby area mass murdered hundreds of Jewish residents of Jedwabne in
occupied Poland .
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedwabne_pogrom>
1976:
An industrial accident in a chemical manufacturing plant near Milan,
Italy, resulted in the highest known exposure to
2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin in residential populations, which
gave rise to numerous scientific studies and standardized industrial
safety regulations.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveso_disaster>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
purport (v):
1. To convey, imply, or profess outwardly.
2. To intend
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purport>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate
goal the betterment of humanity.
--Nikola Tesla
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla>
Show replies by date