
The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages

With their feet held fast to the fire, the Saints ultimately had no choice but to renounce polygamy. But even as LDS leaders publicly claimed, in 1890, to have relinquished the practice, they quietly dispatched bands of Mormons to establish polygamous colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some of the highest-ranking LDS authorities secretly continued
... See moreJon Krakauer • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Writing in 1533, Rodrigo Manrique, himself the son of an inquisitor general, seems to have understood that the logic his father (and so many others) had championed, rather than freeing Spain from Judaism, had instead convicted vast areas of its thought and culture as Jewish. As he put it in a letter to his exiled friend, the humanist Luis Vives, in
... See moreDavid Nirenberg • Anti-Judaism
It was this single change in ecclesiastical policy, more than anything else, that transformed the LDS Church into its astonishingly successful present-day iteration. Having jettisoned polygamy, Mormons gradually ceased to be regarded as a crackpot sect. The LDS Church acquired the trappings of a conventional faith so successfully that it is now wid
... See moreJon Krakauer • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
When at last the walls were breached, the Norman commander Tancred of Hauteville (d.1112) promised protection for the city’s inhabitants; but the crusader army disregarded his orders and – on entering the city – indiscriminately massacred Muslims, Jews and Arab Christians, not sparing women and children. The scale of the atrocity can scarcely be ex
... See more