The strange death of ProtestantismThat broad body of Christian belief and practice known to the world as Protestantism originated in Catholic Western Europe in the 16th century, mostly the fruit of the highly original, expansive mind of Martin Luther, and then of the rather narrower and derivative mind of John Calvin. The pivotal doctrine of Protestantism was encapsulated in the easy and elegant slogan: justification by faith alone.In a Catholic culture in which the passion and death of Jesus on the cross were at the very heart of religious sensibility, Luther's message that Jesus's sacrifice was so overwhelmingly sufficient that...