On October 31—the exact day when the Protestant Reformation began 500 years ago—the Divinity School will host a special lecture on the Reformation by a distinguished Yale scholar: Carlos Eire, T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History & Religious Studies.
Professor Eire will speak at 5:30 p.m. in Niebuhr Hall on “Martin Luther, the Wrath of God?” Many in Luther’s time viewed him as God’s avenger, a prophet chosen by God to undo centuries of corruption and re-establish the true church on earth. The lecture will explore what we can say about that legacy and its meaning for Western Christianity in the light of ecumenism and the aggressive secularization of culture in our own day.
Carlos Eire, who received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1979, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a strong focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural; and the history of death.
Among his nine books are War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (1986) and Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016), which won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities.
Born in Cuba, Eire has also written the acclaimed memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His latest memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, Eire is currently researching attitudes toward miracles in the 16th and 17th centuries.
A reception will follow the lecture.