The Blaisdell Blog

This Sunday, the church will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Reformation Day.  This is my favorite secular day of the Lutheran church year.  In honor of this day, I am reprinting an article I wrote for the Mensa Bulletin several years ago.  This issue was the first time Mensa had allowed articles about religion.  They solicited several regular contributors to write on any religious theme they wanted.  When I was contacted I said yes, but that I would have to write about basic, vanilla flavored, Lutheran church based Christianity.  It was the only thing I knew!  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.   Martin Luther is often depicted as a brooding, personally troubled man.   The pictures of him show a square-jawed German with a grim mouth and a furrowed brow.   Growing up in a Lutheran home, I was sure he had been a brave but angry man, nailing his 95 Thesis on the door of the church in Wittenburg and starting a religious revolution.   Even his decisi

On January 24, 1536, Henry VIII, King of England by the Grace of God, Defender of the Faith, and Head of the Church in England, entered the lists at Greenwich to take part in a jousting tournament.   At age 44 he was an elder statesman of tilt yard, but was still recognized as an excellent horseman and fierce athlete.   He was riding an equally fierce Destrier, the enormous war horses first brought to England by William the Conqueror following the Battle of Hastings in 1066.               The Destrier (now extinct as a breed) had a dense, rounded body with a broad back, strong loins, powerful hind-quarters and long legs with dense bones.   Exactly the same description could be given to King Henry VIII.   The King and his opponent met with a crash.   Henry was thrown from his horse and the animal toppled over on top of him.   Surely, there were many in the crowd who thought their monarch was dead.   Henry was unconscious for at least two hours and then came slowly and painfully

On or about November 12, 1651, near San Miguel Nepantla, Tepetlixpa, Mexico an illegitimate daughter was born to a wild child of middle level Mexican aristocracy.   The child, Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana, had more against her than her out-of-wedlock birth.   She was a female in a time and culture when women had no more rights and less attention than a good brood mare.   Her ancestry included Jewish grandparents in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition.   Add to that the fact that she was a prodigy when intellectual superiority in a woman was considered always suspect, sometimes heretical and occasionally demonic.   Balance that with three strengths: intelligence, wealth and beauty. While wealth and beauty may sound like superficial qualities, they were not insignificant to her rise to prominence.   Without a family with scholarly and financial resources, there would have been no books nor access to any thinking beyond mere survival.   Clearly a genius, Juana was