Moving Heresies

You can't keep a good heretic down. It's his 500th birthday in 2011. Having been slowly cooked by Calvin in Geneva, when he'd only called in for a chat just after half past three, Michael Servetus will soon be going up in the air again this time as a European built aeroplane. He was a chap into how the blood circulated, and heated up, so he must be one for how air goes around the wing of a plane, lifting it and its heavy load into the sky.

Iberia the airline has said yes to the Michael Servetus Institute and the City Council of Villanueva de Sijena to name an Airbus 340/600 with capacity for 352 passengers "Miguel Servet". If we can get a submarine called Francis David (he died in a dungeon) and a bus called Faustus Socinus (Unitarians were ejected from Poland and moved to Transylvania and the Netherlands) - or these are also named according to their local languages - we might be able to have such a three process on land, in the sea and up in the air for a symbolic anti-trinitarian procession.

Now if you think this isn't very funny, wait until I have completed my piece for the next Barton In Depth group meeting for Tuesday, where Doctor Martin stands in his boots for Martin Luther and the theologian Eck has a thumping good debate, and then we have Zwingli and Calvin and lots of drowned Anabaptists by their fellow Protestants, and further horrors, and the string of corruption and death back amongst the Catholics that puts paedophilia into some institutional context, and the only ones consistent with the Renaissance (rather than Augustine of Hippo) were those emerging out of Italy into Poland and of course there were those earliest Unitarian goings on in deep, dark Transylvania that were, subsequently, to resist the Hapsburgs and (just in time) vicious Communists alike.