BRATTLEBORO — Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer will look at the legacy of the Protestant Reformation in a talk at Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St., on Nov. 1 at 7 p.m.
His talk, “Luther and the Reformation: A 500-year Appraisal,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council's First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.
Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses on the cathedral door at Wittenburg 500 years ago launched a movement that utterly transformed Western society and our notions of authority, culture, art, and tradition. In this talk, Balmer will assess the Protestant Reformation half a millennium later.
Balmer is the Mandel Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and chair of the religion department at Dartmouth College. Before coming to Dartmouth, he was professor of American religious history at Columbia University for 27 years.
He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008.
He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985. He is the author of a dozen books, including God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush and Evangelicalism in America.