Theologian's Almanac for Week of May 15, 2022
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, May 15:
May 15 is the day Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things,” the 1891 encyclical addressing labor practices, now considered a foundational document of Catholic social teaching. Leo wrote of a moral obligation to pay a fair and living wage, addressing employers directly: “be mindful of this — that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.”
Thus Leo inaugurated a new chapter in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, in which social justice became viewed as integral to faithful orthodoxy, and the Church stepped forward to articulate official positions on issues of labor, war and peace, governmental responsibility, human rights, and care for creation.
May 15 is also the 153rd anniversary of the National Woman Suffrage Association, formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1869. At the time, the 15th Amendment was being considered, granting voting rights to African-American men, but not to women. Stanton and Anthony argued fiercely that the only voting rights amendment worth supporting would also include women, and their objection proved prescient: the men-only amendment passed, but it would be another 50 years before women could vote. Over the decades, the two women made a formidable team: Stanton raised a family, did the research, and wrote the speeches; Anthony never married, travelled the country, and delivered the speeches Stanton had written. Stanton put it this way: "I am the better writer, she the better critic… and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of thirty long years; arguments that no man has answered."
May 16 is the birthday of writer, historian, and radio personality Studs Terkel, born in New York City in 1912. Famous for his oral histories of ordinary people, Terkel said of interviewing what might also be said of pastoral care: “It isn’t an inquisition; it’s an exploration, usually an exploration into the past. So I think the gentlest question is the best one, and the gentlest is, ‘And what happened then?’” Among other books, Terkel is the author (or “gentle interviewer”) of Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.
May 17 is the 68th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the unanimous Supreme Court ruling in 1954 stating that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection under the law. The ruling completed the reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson, which in 1896 permitted “separate but equal” public facilities. Brown v. Board of Education was a momentous decision, but in many ways is still being worked out: it would take many years for integration to be widely implemented, and de facto school segregation still exists in many American communities today. In fact, such segregation is getting worse, not better. Here’s the remarkable opening statement by Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and Labor, which Scott then chaired. The hearing was entitled: “Brown v. Board of Education at 65: A Promise Unfulfilled.”
May 19 is the birthday of Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. When he was a young boy, white supremacists set fire to his family’s home in East Lansing, Michigan, killing his father (the police later declared it a suicide) and so traumatizing his mother that she later entered a mental institution. Arrested for larceny as a young man, Malcolm spent his time in prison reading books — and eventually joined the Nation of Islam, for whom he served as a minister upon his release, soon rising to national renown. He took the name “X” to symbolize his stolen African heritage, and advocated a fierce defense of black rights and dignity “by any means necessary.” He broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964, and the same year made the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where he met Muslims from a wide range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds — and so returned to the United States with a new message of racial cooperation. He was assassinated soon after, in 1965; he was 39 years old.