Bob Feinman of Humane Borders says he “didn’t spend a whole lot of time paying attention to the rabbis” when he was in religious school as a child. “But the one thing I remember was the Seder every year at Passover, the Exodus. We were the ones that walked around in circles following Moses for all those years. People here are walking in circles, facing an uncertain future and facing death, as we did.”

“We hope to celebrate this anniversary without hiding the problematic side, the dark side of Martin Luther,” says Rev Johannes Block, pastor of the Evangelical City and Parish Church of St. Mary’s in Wittenberg, Germany, where Luther himself preached hundreds and hundreds of sermons in the 16th century. “The Reformation said you are responsible for yourself,” he continued. “Everybody is responsible for his faith. It’s a step of democracy. Everybody is equal in the church.”

“I don’t see Protestant-Catholic unity coming in the immediate future,” says Michael Root, professor of systematic theology at the Catholic University of America. “There are real differences. The question we face is how do we both affirm the commonalities while being honest about the continuing differences?”

Follow along as managing editor Kim Lawton visits several key sites in Germany associated with Martin Luther and the beginning of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago.

“We have a government now that is trying to legislate what it means to be faithful—faithful to America, faithful to a particular religious perspective,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “We heard that in the pre-inaugural sermon that the president was presented with, and if you don’t fit into that pretty narrow definition of what it means to be an American religious person, that has a chilling effect on your sense of being at home in this country.”

“We’re going back to where it all began,” says Fr. Columba Stewart, a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, “with a variety of models of Christian ascetic life, and by ascetic I just mean disciplined. That’s what people are discovering, and they’re figuring out ways they can live as individuals, as families, as loose associations of friends who find this particular path to be helpful, sustaining, and nourishing to them.”

“What St. Benedict is doing is providing a charter for making a community that really endures and that can encompass a variety of people who aren’t all there because they have the same personality or like the same music or have the same hobby. They’re all there for some purpose that’s really beyond themselves, this spiritual quest, and they recognize they can’t do it by themselves.”

His movie "Silence," says director Martin Scorsese, “is the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. You have to find a relationship with Jesus,” says Scorsese, “with yourself, really, because that’s the one you face.”

“I have heard that the Trump presidency could see the reemergence of a real Christian left in the United States,” says Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America.

“I said this to myself in the face of my captors: You have the power to break my body, and you’ve tried. You have the power to bend my mind, and you’ve tried. But my soul is not yours to possess. In other words, my soul lay in the hand of God.”