The Famous Five

"He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next" (Vonnegut 23). Slaughterhouse-Five is written by Kurt Vonnegut who uses this story as an autobiography to explain what he experienced during the war. The reader follows a man named Billy Pilgrim go through his life in a sporadic jumps of memories. Billy served as a soldier in World War 2 and was present as a POW in the firebombing of Dresden. Following this event,…

I was not prepared for the day I was told that my daughter had cancer. I froze as the words came out of her doctors ' mouth. I went numb and suddenly felt as if I were beside myself. At first, I did not believe the doctor and assumed he was mistakenly reading the papers of another patient. I wanted to pretend like the doctor had not mentioned anything at all. But, after a few minutes of letting the news sink in, I knew that I was going to have to suck it up and get through it, whatever the end…

Pope Francis added his voice to the capitalism debate with his Apostolic Exhortation, "Evangelii Gaudium" published in November of 2013. It is based on "the church's primary mission of evangelization in the modern world." In this slamming rebuke against capitalism he describes this as being the "new tyranny," and asks for better politicians who can heal the scars that capitalism has made on society. Capitalism promotes inequality in a way that if left unchecked allows the rich to become…

subject matter that they wanted to share to others. Through their art, they were able to give the sense of participation in major events in the Christian story and in the ritual of worships. The Italian baroque were famous for their architecture, sculpture, and paintings. Some of the most famous painters at this time was Caravaggio, Gentileschi, and…

How the Church changed Indulgences and How Indulgences Changed the Church Indulgences have been the epitome of corruption in the Catholic Church and rightly so. When the Catholic Church created the indulgence system they began do collect money without honesty and began to act truly like a state over a group of Christians. It is abhorrent; however, it was not purposeless and there was a reason the Church needed the ill-obtained money. The idea of indulgences was not created with ill intent, but…

2. Protestant beliefs began to take hold throughout Europe, and they were proving to be both revolutionary and opposed to authority. The Protestant’s new beliefs didn’t just challenge religious hierarchy, but it also caused strife in politics. One instance in which Protestantism defied Catholic doctrine and changed politics was the idea of a presbyterian government. Contrary to the traditional Catholic hierarchy, Calvinists supported a presbyterian system, where a council of elders made sure…

Faisal Ghazwani His 171 The Protestant Reformation was in the 16th century. During the middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was an extremely powerful, unifying force of the people. As a result, the pope acted as the intermediary between men and God. As the Church gained more and more power, it began to use corrupt methods to earn money and control the mass. When the Church needs to finance its large building projects for Renaissance artists, it sold indulgences. Indulgences were “tickets”…

Although the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut is an anti-war book, I believe time was more importantly presented within the book rather than warfare. It is easy to feel this way seeing as that the theme dominates every chapter of this “jumbled” book. Vonnegut develops this theme throughout the book by telling events throughout Billy Pilgrim’s life. Let's just say, for a mild mannered, scrawny man, he's able to get around. Events in the novel aren't presented directly, but instead…

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the doors of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. At that time, the Catholic church had twisted the original meaning of scriptures to encourage the buying of indulgences, which were paid passes out of purgatory, the costly visiting of relics, most of which were fake, and the submission to the ultimate authority of the pope, who was one of the most powerful men in the world. To add to this injustice, the church purposely refrained from…

Thomas Jefferson (the first US Secretary of State, its second Vice President, and third President) and John Adams (the first US Vice President and its second President) are two of the most influential authors on the Declaration of Independence. But their religious views differ greatly. Jefferson believes Jesus ‘perhaps the greatest of history’s moral teachers’ but he doesn’t subscribe to the religiously fundamental view. Or as Schama puts it, Jefferson doesn’t believe Jesus to be a…