Who made our minds?

Loyola limbers up

The spear of the 'Counter-Reformation' founded the most revered and loathed religious order in the history of faith

Oct 9 • 

Paul Ham

1

'Antichrist' versus 'Satan'

Christendom tore itself apart over whether a wafer was Christ's body or ... a wafer

Oct 2 • 

Paul Ham

2

September 2025

Luther's wrath...

How the 'protests' of a German friar launched a new spiritual movement of 'Protestants' and split the Catholic Church

Sep 25 • 

Paul Ham

2

2

The smoke of Purgatory

Pardoners were selling something more valuable than cures, tulips or bitcoin. They were selling eternal life...

Sep 18 • 

Paul Ham

3

2

Kindling for the Reformation

When Gutenberg first printed the 'Word of God', Rome felt the fury of an oppressed people who knew they'd been deceived for centuries

Sep 11 • 

Paul Ham

2

The man who resurrected Confucius

Wang Yangming and the neo-Confucian ideal

Sep 4 • 

Paul Ham

2

August 2025

Aquinas 'completed' Aristotle

Then 'the last man to die a virgin' fell silent...

Aug 28 • 

Paul Ham

1

Meanwhile, in the monasteries...

The monks had not been idle, until many went mad

Aug 21 • 

Paul Ham

1

2

Maimonides and the god of the perplexed

The great Jewish thinker laid the moral foundations of Judaism. Israel's regime and their enemies ought to read him...

Aug 14 • 

Paul Ham

3

Light in the 'Dark Ages': the flowers of Islam

Early Islamic philosophers prefigured Descartes and anticipated Western ideas of psychology, 'bonding' and the separation of God and State by 1,000…

Aug 7 • 

Paul Ham

2

2

July 2025

God's wars

Breathe out: this is the last of my essays on medieval horror inflicted in the name of God or Allah. Next week we return to the marvels of the mind!

Jul 31 • 

Paul Ham

2

3

Poor Jerusalem, 1099

The first crusaders showed no mercy

Jul 24 • 

Paul Ham

3