But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.
The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.
In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry.
We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century,' and yet that's what we're demanding in food production.
Freedom was the desire of our people throughout centuries. Freedom enabled our people to be owners of their destiny.
My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.
But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.
Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.
Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.
The search for a Jewish national home came about due to centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms, expulsions, discrimination and hate. The Holocaust was simply the evil culmination of all that came before it.
What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.
The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.
Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity.
Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.
However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.
