Luther A. Allen

Bad for Business: Luther Against the Papacy

This paper analyzes Martin Luther’s criticism of increasingly corrupt church practices, including, the papacy’s granting of indulgences, the promotion of pilgrimage, the preservation and exploitation of relics, the cult of saints, and the belief in saintly intercession. I will examine how Luther’s critiques of these practices were expressed in the religious propaganda that circulated during thi...

Current Issues and Trends in Luther Studies

Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born into the closed society of segregated Georgia, a grandson of sharecroppers not far removed from America's original sin of slavery. This year, he is being honored a day before Barack Obama will place his hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible and take the oath of office as the nation's first black president. "The arc of history is long," King reminded us, "but ...

Spectral properties of Luther-Emery systems

We calculate the spectral function of the Luther-Emery model which describes one-dimensional fermions with gapless charge and gapped spin degrees of freedom. We find a true singularity with interaction dependent exponents on the gapped spin dispersion and a finite maximum depending on the magnitude of the spin gap, on a shifted charge dispersion. We apply these results to photoemission experime...

A Conversation with Nathan Allen

I t all started when Nathan Allen was stuck in the lab, babysitting his experiments for hours at a time. The 10or 15-minute blocks between checking on his reactions weren’t long enough to dig into anything substantial. Instead, he recalls, “I posted snarky comments on the internet, which you can do in 5 minutes.” Soon, Allen was answering science questions on the Web site Reddit, where he saw p...