Martin Luther And Religion In America, February 21, 2018, 1:30 pm at the Town & Country Resort. $5 admission for non-members. Admission for non-members is $5.
Professor Randall Balmer will be giving a talk in the Lamoille Community OLLI series on Wednesday, February 21 at 1:30 pm. Dr. Balmer's talk is titled Martin Luther & Religion in America. The talk will be held at the Town and Country Resort on the Mountain Road.
The talk will cover Martin Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church 500 years ago, which ushered in the modern age and its suspicions of authority and institutions. Nowhere has this played out more completely than in North America. This lecture summarizes the effects of the Protestant Reformation, especially on the religious landscape of North America.
A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before becoming the Mandel Family Professor in the Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College in 2012; two years later, he was named Dartmouth Professor in the Arts & Sciences, and in 2015 he was named to the John Phillips Chair in Religion, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth. In 2014, he was named the inaugural director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth.
Dr. Balmer has published widely in both scholarly journals and in the popular press. His op-ed articles have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Anchorage Daily News, and the New York Times. His work has also appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, Christian Century, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Washington Post Book World. Dr. Balmer is regularly asked to comment on religion in American life, and he has appeared frequently on network television, on NPR, and on both the Colbert Report and the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart. He has been an expert witness in several First Amendment cases, including Snyder v. Phelps and Glassroth v. Moore, the so-called Alabama Ten Commandments case.
Dr. Balmer has published more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter and The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part documentary for PBS. Dr. Balmer wrote and hosted that series as well as a two-part series on creationism and a documentary on Billy Graham. He has lectured around the country in such venues as the Commonwealth Club of California and the Chautauqua Institution and, under the auspices of the State Department, in Austria and Lebanon.