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Christian History

Today in Christian History

March 14

March 14, 1872: Journalist Henry Stanley and explorer-missionary David Livingstone part company, having spent the last five months in Africa together. Stanley returned to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer (see issue 56: David Livingstone).

March 14, 1937: Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical against the Nazi "cult": "Race, nation, state . . . all have an essential and honorable place within the secular order," he wrote. "To abstract them, however, from the earthly scale of values and make them the supreme norm of all values, including religious ones, and divinize them with an idolatrous cult, is to be guilty of perverting and falsifying the order of things created and commanded by God" (see issue 32: Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

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May 6, 1527: An army of barbarians who had been sent—but were no longer controlled—by Emperor Charles V sacks Rome. Many Protestants interpreted the attack as a divine rebuke, and some Catholics agreed: "We who should have been the salt of the earth decayed until we were good for nothing," wrote Cardinal Cajetan, Luther's adversary. "Everyone is convinced that all this has happened as a judgment of God on the great tyranny and disorders of the papal court.

May 6, 1638: Dutch theologian ...

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