Global Family Tree, Martin Luther's 500 Year-Anniversary

It’s All Relative: Building a Global Family Tree Guest: A.J. Jacobs, Author of “It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree” Growing up in Utah a couple decades ago, the genealogy basics were a prerequisite from around the age of 10. All the kids in Sunday School took home a paper chart and scratched in their names and birthdates, then those of parents, then grandparents and great-grandparents. Four generations were the goal. And that’s where family history efforts usually stopped, because going any farther would have required hours of staring at microfilm in a musty library.  Then the internet happened. And today building your family tree is more like building your little twig on the branch of on one enormous, collaborative online sequoia. A global family tree showing how all 7.6 billion of us on the planet are connected. Experimental journalist A.J. Jacobs figured a global family needs a reunion. So that’s what he set out to organize, because he’s a guy who likes using his own life as the stage for big ideas. After all, he spent a year trying to follow all the laws of the Bible and then wrote about it in the best-selling book, “The Year of Living Biblically.” His new book is “It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree.” 500 Year-Anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation  Guest: Brad Gregory, PhD, Professor, History, University of Notre Dame, Author, “Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World” The world might be a different place were it not for the spiritual crisis of one Catholic friar in the early 1500s. Martin Luther was hardly looking to fracture the Catholic Church when he published his Ninety-Five Theses, but once his ideas gained publicity, the Reformation became a movement Martin Luther could not control, and he would, most likely, be appalled by where it led.