by Nicholas Davis-GENEVA – Five hundred years ago this week, a little-known priest and university 
lecturer in theology did something unremarkable for his time: he nailed a petition to a door, demanding an academic debate on the Catholic Church’s practice of selling “indulgences” – promises that the buyer or a relative would spend less time in purgatory after they died.
Today, Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” posted at the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany (he simultaneously sent a copy to his boss, Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg), are widely recognized as the spark that started the Protestant Reformation. Within a year, Luther had become one of Europe’s most famous people, and his ideas – which challenged not only Church practice and the Pope’s authority, but ultimately man’s relationship with God – had begun to reconfigure systems of power and identity in ways that are still felt today.
