"Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press. ... They cost in the equivalent in today's dollars of about $25,000 to produce a manuscript. So unless you were a king or a bishop or something, you probably had never really read a book. And then, all of a sudden, the printing press reduced the cost of publishing a book by about 500 times, so everyone who was literate at least could read. But what happened is that people used those books as a way to proselytize and to spread heretical ideas, some of which are popular now but at the time caused a lot of conflict. The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before. And, look, when something is on the page or the Internet, people tend to believe it a lot more, and so you had disagreements that wound up playing into greater sectarianism and even warfare."
The New York Times leads with, and the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times front, two deadly bombings in Iraq yesterday that put the country's two-day death toll over 150. Sunni insurgent groups took responsibility for the attacks, which fueled worry that the country might explode into sectarian violence as the U.S.
noun [C], adjective MAINLY DISAPPROVING
(a person) strongly supporting a particular religious group, especially in such a way as not to be willing to accept other beliefs:
a sectarian murder
He called on terrorists on both sides of the sectarian divide to end the cycle of violence.
sectarianism
noun [U] DISAPPROVING
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