Theologian's Almanac for Week of August 1, 2021
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 1:
August 1 is the birthday of Maria Mitchell, the first renowned female astronomer, born on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1818. Her Quaker parents believed that girls and boys had equal rights to education and academic achievement, and Maria shared her father’s enthusiasm for science and the stars. She later put it this way: we should “not look at the stars as bright spots only [but] try to take in the vastness of the universe," since "every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.”
Mitchell was the first American to discover a comet (later dubbed, “Miss Mitchell’s Comet”); the first woman appointed to the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the first woman to earn an advanced degree (in 1853); and the first female astronomy professor in American history.
She once said: “We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.”
August 2 is the birthday of the American writer James Baldwin, born in Harlem, New York City, in 1924. The oldest of nine children, James was ushered into Pentecostal ministry at the age of 14. After a crisis of faith, he left home and began living, working, and writing in Greenwich Village. At 24, as he began to fully recognize his homosexuality, he moved to France — both to escape American prejudices and to gain a kind of distance and perspective from which he could write about his life experience.
In the 1960s, he returned to the United States to take part in the Civil Rights Movement. He befriended Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, and wrote “The Fire Next Time” and “No Name in the Street,” now considered classics. With Langston Hughes, he recruited Nina Simone to get involved in the movement, and helped make arrangements for Maya Angelou to write her breakthrough memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Baldwin was profoundly demoralized; he returned to Europe, where he lived until his death in 1987. The recent documentary about Baldwin’s work, “I Am Not Your Negro,” is required viewing (or re-viewing). And what better day to do it than today!
August 3 is the birthday of English children’s author Juliana Horatia Ewing, born in Ecclesfield, England, in 1841. She was the eldest daughter of Rev. Alred Gatty and Margaret Gatty, a scientist and writer. Though largely unknown today, she was widely popular and influential in her time, writing engaging childrens stories and poems intended to convey particular Christian values she held dear, including the conviction that each person’s worth is “equal in God’s sight.” One of her most popular books was entitled, “The Brownies and Other Tales” — the origin of the “Brownies” name for junior-level Girl Scouts.
Here’s a lovely little taste of her poetry:
“Gifts”
by Juliana Horatia Ewing
You ask me what since we must part
You shall bring back to me.
Bring back a pure and faithful heart
As true as mine to thee.
You talk of gems from foreign lands,
Of treasure, spoil, and prize.
Ah love! I shall not search your hands
But look into your eyes.
August 5 is the birthday of the American writer Wendell Berry, born near Port Royal, Kentucky, in 1934. His family — on both sides — have farmed tobacco in the area for at least five generations, and Berry and his wife Tanya have become the sixth. His writing includes poems, essays, stories, and novels, including works set in Port William, a fictional version of Port Royal. Berry said: “I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived. By means of the imagined place, over the last fifty years, I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it.”
On writing: “I've known writers — I think it's true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you're just going to find that you can't always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn't. There are a number of things more important than your art. It's wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals."
On Christianity: A Christian himself, Berry takes adamant exception to Christians who decline to take the care of creation seriously. Most Sundays over his adult life, he’s taken a Sabbath walk in the woods near his farm, and has written many “Sabbath poems” as a result (here’s one). He’s been a fierce critic and activist against the death penalty, nuclear power, the coal industry, the Vietnam War, industrial agriculture, and dependence on fossil fuels, among other issues. In 1973, he and the Californian poet Gary Snyder began a correspondence across geographical and religious distances (Snyder is a Buddhist). Over more than 40 years, they exchanged nearly 250 letters on subjects from writing to religion, philosophy to farming. In 2014, their dialogue was published as the book, “Distant Neighbors.”
August 6 is the day in 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in 1870, prohibits denying the right to vote “based on race, color or previous condition of servitude,” but many States concocted other ways, “race-neutral” on their surface, that had the effect of prohibiting Black people from voting — and the Voting Rights Act was intended to do away with these so-called “Jim Crow” provisions once and for all. In a televised address, President Johnson put it this way: “The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote [...] it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Martin Luther King Jr. later said that he wept when he heard the president say the words, “we shall overcome.” In recent years the United States Supreme Court has limited and narrowed the Act’s powers, and many States are passing new voting laws widely considered to be taking a page out of the old Jim Crow playbook: race-neutral on the surface, but with targeted race-specific effects.
August 6 is also the day in 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The single blast, equivalent to 12,000 tons of TNT, killed 80,000 people on impact, 35,000 more over the next week due to injuries and radiation poisoning, and 60,000 more over the next year. The bomb exploded near a hospital; 90 percent of the city’s doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of WWII — and the beginning of the nuclear age.
August 7 is the birthday of paleoanthropologist and archeologist Louis Leakey, born in Kabete, Kenya, in 1903. His parents were Anglican missionaries in Kenya; Leakey lived there until he was 16. He studied at Cambridge at a time when the prevailing theory was that humanity had originated in Asia. But Leakey was intrigued with Darwin's proposal that, because Africa is the home of our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, humanity may have originated there as well. After graduating from Cambridge, Leakey moved back to the land of youth to find compelling support for Darwin’s hunch — and in time, he and his wife and partner, paleontologist Mary Leakey, did just that.