Culture

Integrity comes from the Latin integer, meaning 'whole' or 'undivided' — the same root as the math word for a whole number. A person of integrity is undivided: what they believe, say, and do all match, whether or not anyone is watching. Its opposite vice is duplicity or hypocrisy — being 'two-faced,' saying one thing and doing another. The Reformation era is full of people forced to choose: Luther at Worms ('Here I stand'), and Thomas More in the Tower, who could have saved his life with a single dishonest oath. More's integrity was not stubbornness; it was the refusal to let fear divide his outer words from his inner conscience. Scripture anchors this virtue: 'Let your word be Yes, Yes or No, No; anything more than this comes from evil' (Matthew 5:37), and 'The integrity of the upright guides them' (Proverbs 11:3). Integrity does not mean being rude or loud; More was gentle and witty to the end. It means your 'yes' can be trusted.

By 1850 the United States held land won from Mexico, and the old question returned with new force: would slavery spread into the new territories? Congress patched the crisis with the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California as a free state but also passed a harsh Fugitive Slave Act that forced Northerners to help capture escaped slaves. Many in the North were horrified. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' a novel that made the cruelty of slavery vivid to millions of readers and inflamed feeling on both sides.

The truce did not hold. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act let settlers in those territories vote on slavery ("popular sovereignty"), undoing the old Missouri Compromise line. Pro- and anti-slavery settlers rushed in, and the territory erupted into violence remembered as "Bleeding Kansas." In 1857 the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ruled that Black Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories — a shock to the growing antislavery movement. In 1859 the abolitionist John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, hoping to spark a slave uprising; he was captured and hanged, becoming a martyr to some and a terror to others. The 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates had already made Abraham Lincoln a national voice against slavery's spread. Step by step, compromise was failing.

Key facts: - Compromise of 1850 — admitted California free; included the Fugitive Slave Act. - 1852 — Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' - 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act — "popular sovereignty"; led to "Bleeding Kansas." - 1857 — Dred Scott decision denied Black citizenship. - 1858 — the Lincoln-Douglas debates. - 1859 — John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

The Reformation changed not just churches but the walls inside them. Some reformers, reading the commandment against 'graven images,' concluded that religious art was idolatry. In waves of iconoclasm (the destroying of images), mobs smashed statues, whitewashed frescoes, and burned paintings across parts of Germany, Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands. Catholic regions defended sacred images, teaching that honor given to an icon passes to the person it represents (a doctrine settled centuries earlier in 787). Two great German artists lived right in the middle of this. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) of Nuremberg was the finest printmaker of the age; his engravings like Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and his woodcut series spread across Europe like Luther's pamphlets — printmaking and the Reformation grew up together. Durer admired Luther but stayed within a reforming, image-friendly tradition. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) was Luther's close friend and the visual propagandist of the Reformation, painting Luther's portrait many times and illustrating Protestant Bibles, while also producing 'Law and Gospel' paintings that taught Lutheran theology in pictures. So even as some Protestants rejected art, others — like Cranach — used it powerfully to teach. The lasting result: Catholic art would soon answer with the dramatic, emotional Baroque (next week's topic).

In your notebook, answer in two or three sentences: 'The Reformation destroyed some art and inspired other art. What was lost, and what was made?' Then check your integrity resolution from this morning — did you keep it today?