Theologian's Almanac for Week of August 30, 2020
Welcome to SALT’s “Theologian’s Almanac,” a weekly selection of important birthdays, holidays, and other upcoming milestones worth marking - specially created for a) writing sermons and prayers, b) creating content for social media channels, and c) enriching your devotional life.
For the week of Sunday, August 30:
September 1 is the day in 1773 that 20-year-old Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book of poetry published by an African-American. Kidnapped in West Africa at the age of eight and put on the Phillis, a slave ship, she was sold to a prominent tailor in Boston, John Wheatley, and was manumitted in 1778 - two years after George Washington invited her to his headquarters to meet her, so impressed was he with her poetry. She rarely wrote about herself or her life as an enslaved person - with the notable exception of “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” a poem in which Wheatley pointedly admonishes “Christians” that “Negroes,” too, may “join th’ angelic train.”
September 2 is the birthday of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, born in 1894, who wrote The Wandering Jews, a book of essays about the plight of European Jews struggling to survive. Of the shtetl, the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe, Roth wrote: “The shtetl Jews are not rare visitors of God, they live with him. In their prayers they inveigh against him, they complain at his severity, they go to God to accuse God. There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their god. They are an old people and they have known him a long time!”
September 3 is the birthday of anthropologist, naturalist, and author Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1907. In poetic, evocative prose, he wrote a series of books that inspired a generation of nature writers, including The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and The Star Thrower (1979). His essay, “How Flowers Changed the World,” is a little masterpiece, and a classic example of Eiseley’s knack for evoking creation’s wonder: "The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs…"
September 3 is also the date in 1838 that Frederick Douglass, disguised as a sailor, boarded a train to escape from slavery. He went on to become a tireless advocate for the abolition of slavery. He also supported women’s suffrage, and in 1848, was one of the original signatories of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments.” “I love that religion,” he wrote, “which sends its votaries to bind up the wounds of those who have fallen among thieves.” And again: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened around his own neck.”
September 4 is the day in 1957 that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus summoned the National Guard to bar nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. President Dwight D. Eisenhower then sent in the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the students could enroll. In an address to the nation, Eisenhower put it this way: “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.” Today is a day to remember the courage and dignity of the “Little Rock Nine” - and at the same time, to recall and reflect on the “Little Rock Thousand,” the mob of approximately one thousand white people who surrounded Central High School, shouting ugly epithets as the soldiers ushered the nine teenagers into the building.