September 9: How a Religious Rivalry from Five Centuries Ago Can Help Us Understand Today’s Fractured World

By Guillaume Malle

Sunday September 9, Michael Massing will introduce his highly praised recent dual biography called Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind. Initially allied in their efforts to reform the Catholic Church, Erasmus and Luther had a bitter falling out over such key matters as works and faith, conduct and creed, free will and predestination.  Their rivalry represented a fault line in Western thinking—between the Renaissance and the Reformation, humanism and evangelicalism—that remains a powerful force in the world today.

Michael Massing is a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, and often writes for the New York Review of Books.  Michael previously wrote about the War on Drugs in his book, The Fix, and about American journalism, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq. Michael received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.