Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant.

But it so happened he was speaking in a Protestant Church.

And that Copernican revolution continues today to influence science and philosophy and technology and theology.

It isn't a time for explanation, or preaching, or theology it's a time for tears.

The theology was perfect, the timing unquestionable, and the answer as honest as a sinner could get.

In 1807, Robert Morrison, the first British Protestant missionary to China arrived in Guangzhou.

Science had been all interlocked with theology, and philosophy, and and and mathematics, which is really not science.

We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon.

We saw scientific revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before.

Uzbekistan's system of religious education includes the Tashkent Islamic Institute, 10 madrassas and Orthodox and Protestant seminaries.

The Protestant International Church in Islamabad, for instance, is one of the best protected buildings in Pakistan.

Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions are the only denominations that benefit from confessional education in the school system.

And we thought, sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good.

The private system includes two business colleges, five high schools and several elementary schools, most of which are affiliated with Roman Catholic and Protestant religious denominations.

When you are brought up as a Catholic, you think that if you ever set foot in a Protestant Church, you'll be struck dead at the threshold.

Most examples of violent crime by mentally ill people were committed first in England, and then in the US, often seeming politically motivated, even when mediated by religion. The first such case was likely that of Peter Berchet, a young Protestant, who felt that he had to kill the royal councilor Christopher Hatton, also a Protestant, whom Berchet believed to be a Catholic sympathizer.

The most essential questions that humans face today those that engender the deepest conflicts have nothing to do with theology. They concern disputes over territory, political power, definitions of rights, and distribution of wealth.

And it's not based on theology or philosophy, it's in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology, we're developing a revolution in consciousness.

After all, Pope Francis s native region, Latin America, is currently home to nearly half (44 ) of the world s Catholics. But the Catholic Church is increasingly losing out to Protestant competition there and elsewhere.

Pull one thread the celibacy requirement for priests, for example and the whole edifice comes crashing down. Consider what has happened to liberalizing Protestant denominations, which, for all their good intentions, have lost adherents.

Starting in the autumn of 2008, a single program of ethics and religious culture will be offered to all pupils at the primary and secondary levels, replacing the current Roman Catholic, Protestant and moral education programs.

Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic and they took to the streets to say, No more violence.

I was in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them a risky thing to do, because they were street kids.

It is remarkable that some of the most critical concepts of Muslim religious terminology have now become part of the international language of current affairs. Questions drawn from Islamic theology are discussed freely by the world public, engaging specialists and non specialists, Muslims and non Muslims.

Abelard is credited with the introduction of theology as a critical discipline in Christianity. Yet, he did so by juxtaposing contradictory quotes taken out of context, showing that neither the Bible nor the Church fathers speak in one voice and that readers must decide for themselves.

They depended much less on foreign creditors than on domestic lenders. The Dutch model was exported to Britain in 1688, along with the political revolution that deposed the Catholic James II and put the Dutch Protestant William of Orange on the English throne.

Alas for them, however, the Flemish have no such desire. Belgium, after all, became an independent state in 1830, precisely in order to liberate the Catholic Flemish, as well as the Walloons, from being second class subjects in a Protestant Dutch monarchy.

It may even be that religious language does not adequately express the repulsion we all feel toward the terrorists actions. No feeling of victimhood can justify, under any conditions, such crimes against innocents, and no theology can accept the negation of the human essence that we all share.

It was standard pre modern practice to overcome such differences with a formal disputation. In the early sixteenth century, the German princes attempted to settle the philosophical challenge presented by Protestant reformers by engaging Martin Luther to debate a prominent orthodox Catholic theologian, Johannes Eck.

The British economist Walter Bagehot replied at the time that there would probably be two competing world currencies, which he termed Latin and Teutonic. By Teutonic, Bagehot seemed to mean the Protestant world the United States, recovering from the Civil War, Germany, and Britain.

The modern tendency to regard economic differences in terms of religion was stimulated by Max Weber s reflections on the Protestant work ethic. But that interpretation is clearly unsatisfactory, and cannot account for the dynamism of the deeply Catholic world of Renaissance Italy and Flanders.

Out of the spotlight, countless Muslim scholars and academics have continued to probe the connections between Islamic thought and modern values. Drawing on critical scholarship in history and theology, they have detailed the ways in which Muslims have changed and continue to change their traditions, in different times and places.

Governments have always worried about the flow and control of information, and our age is hardly the first to be strongly affected by dramatic changes in information technology. Gutenberg s printing press was important to the origins of the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing wars in Europe.

Consider Ireland, where for many years Catholics objected that if a vote were held within Northern Ireland, the two thirds Protestant majority would rule. Protestants replied that if a vote were held within the geographical area of the entire island, the two thirds Catholic majority would rule.

Gaelic is spoken by only about 80,000 of Scotland s 5.1 million inhabitants. Nor does religion play a discernible role while Roman Catholics used to fear independence as being liable to result in Protestant hegemony, today Catholics and Protestants are roughly equal in their support of Scotland s institutions.

Indeed, even Bush s own political base, the Christian fundamentalists, are becoming green, pressuring the administration to sign the Kyoto Protocol because they believe that the environment must be protected just like unborn life. Eco theology and evangelical pro life propaganda have become one of the liveliest branches of the US environmental movement.

Pope Benedict, being from Germany, a predominantly Protestant country, does not carry the weight of this bitter history. Perhaps this is one reason why Alexi responded positively to Benedict s first speech urging reconciliation, saying that he hopes that this will improve Orthodox Catholic relations on the post Soviet territory.

All forms of religious fundamentalism rely on the notion of a pure religion independent of cultural variations and influences. Today's Islamic revival shares the dogmatism, communitarianism, and scripturalism of American evangelist movements both reject culture, philosophy, and even theology to favor a literalist reading of sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith.

It was as natural for an Elizabethan Protestant to see the cause of his mental discomfort in a government overrun by Catholic sympathizers as it is for someone with a Muslim connection in the US today to see this cause in America as the embodiment of Western offenses against the faith.

Syria s Sunnis are increasingly invoking theology to justify hatred of the Shia minority, and forms of Sunni exclusivism, similar to Al Qaeda s ideology and worldview, are becoming the norm. While Assad has secured the Alawite community s renewed support, he has done so at the cost of increasing the very real danger that the rebels will punish all Alawites for the regime s crimes.

He described his first house call in the 1960s, when he and a senior colleague visited a jovial protestant minister who had no idea that he only had weeks to live, owing to aggressive colon cancer. The senior doctor suggested giving the patient large doses of painkillers, which they would tell the patient were antibiotics to treat an infection.

French President François Hollande is constantly flirting with the idea of building a new Latin bloc, in which Spain and Italy would join France in the struggle against fiscal austerity. In this vision, Latin superiority consists in a more expansive view of the state s capacity to secure incomes and create wealth, and less of the Protestant obsession with the individual s work.

If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us and she had a baby, and that's the son of God, I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous.

We live in an age in which many people are disillusioned with secular politics, and are turning to religion instead, not only throughout the Muslim world, but in the core of Western civilization, Christian Europe and Evangelist America. Nor is the Jewish state of Israel, where Messianic fanatics and religious nationalists have embraced a political theology that questions the very legitimacy of the democratic institutions, immune from this phenomenon.

Meanwhile, surveys have repeatedly shown that most Filipinos favor making contraceptives available, which is not surprising, given that the Church approved birth control methods mentioned by Francis are demonstrably less reliable than modern alternatives. It is hard to believe that if the Philippines had been colonized by, say, Protestant Britain rather than Catholic Spain, the use of contraception would be an issue there today.