Theologian's Almanac for Week of May 21, 2023
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 21:
May 22 is the anniversary of the debut of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, introducing generations of young children to ideas of kindness, diversity, peace, and even death and grief — eventually becoming the longest-running children’s program on television. Fred Rogers was a Protestant pastor who considered the show to be his ministry. Rogers said: “The world is not always a kind place. That’s something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it’s something they really need our help to understand.” One of his trademark cardigans hangs today in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
Here’s a lovely gift from Rogers himself: “One Silent Minute.”
May 23 is the birthday of poet Jane Kenyon, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1947. Kenyon’s grandmother was a fire-and-brimstone Methodist, which frightened Kenyon as a child, and eventually lead her to withdraw from religion. But she returned to Christianity later in life, and many of her later poems explore theological territory. She translated the work of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and attended a local Congregational Church in New Hampshire. When asked if her newfound faith influenced her writing, she said, “My spiritual life is so much a part of my intellectual life and my feeling life that it’s really become impossible for me to keep it out of my work.” Here’s an example, and another.
Here’s Kenyon’s advice for living: “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.”
May 23 is also the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, author of the classic, Goodnight Moon (1947), which she wrote out of frustration that the children’s literature of her day didn’t include familiar, everyday objects children could relate to. She also wrote one of the best (implicitly) theological stories of the twentieth century, Runaway Bunny (1942).
May 24 is the birthday of Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941. Dylan received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016, and in his songwriting, turned frequently toward theological subjects, including three consecutive albums focused on Christian themes and ideas. Here’s SALT’s brief essay, “The Gospel According to Bob Dylan.” And here’s a little known Dylan fact: in 1963, he and Joan Baez performed on the Lincoln Memorial stage at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and then, a few minutes later, looked on as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King delivered what became known as his “I Have a Dream” speech.
May 25 is the beginning of the Jewish Festival of Weeks, or Shavuot (pronounced “sha-voo-OAT” (rhymes with “coat”)), celebrated 50 days after Passover. For the ancient Israelites, this festival was an explicitly diverse, inclusive harvest celebration (see Deut 16:11; Lev 23:16), and over time, it also came to mark the reception of the Torah at Mount Sinai.
May 25 is also the birthday of philosopher, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston in 1803. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, introduced him to a wide range of philosophies and spiritual ideas, including the Hindu scriptures he would revisit in later years. As a teenager at Harvard, he began keeping journals, which he called his "savings bank" — and later suggested to his friend and protégé, Henry David Thoreau, that he should do the same. Emerson served as pastor of Boston’s Second Church, but after a crisis of faith, he decided to resign: “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry.” In his book, Nature (1836), he first introduced the ideas that would later become known as Transcendentalism, including the conviction that spiritual insight could be gleaned directly through intuition, since divinity pervades all of nature, including humanity. He said, “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.”
May 26 is the day the German monk Martin Luther was declared an outlaw and a heretic by the Edict of Worms in 1521. The declaration ended up making Luther even more of a folk hero than he already was, advancing his cause of church reform rather than hindering it. In 1517, Luther had published 95 theses criticizing church teachings and practices, in particular the sale of indulgences (said to decrease the time a person was required to spend in purgatory). As his ideas began to catch on — spread with help from a relatively new-fangled invention, the printing press — some of the powers-that-be began to worry, and pressured Charles V into calling a disciplinary assembly in the city of Worms. As Luther traveled to Worms in order to attend, he was greeted as a hero by the townsfolk along the way. By the time he arrived at the assembly, his resolve was set: “Here I stand,” he famously said, refusing to recant. “I can do no other. God help me!”
May 27 is the birthday of ecologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, born in Pennsylvania in 1907. The work for which she is best known, Silent Spring, became one of the most influential books in the rise of the modern environmental movement. She wrote, “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings… Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change… On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”
The book was heavily criticized by the chemical industry, who set out to discredit Carson’s work and smear her reputation as a scientist. President Kennedy read Silent Spring in the summer of 1962, and formed a presidential commission to study the government’s use of pesticides. The commission vindicated Carson’s findings.
Her first love, however, was the sea, and she won the National Book Award in nonfiction for her best-seller, The Sea Around Us (1951). In her acceptance speech, she said, “The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science…. The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”
May 27 is also the birthday of suffragist and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, born in New York City in 1819, and the author of the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Early one morning, she was inspired to write new, Christian lyrics to the tune of the marching song, “John Brown’s Body.” She called her new song, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and it was originally published as a poem in Atlantic Monthly. It became a sensation among Union soldiers and, later, among abolitionists. It’s said that Abraham Lincoln wept upon hearing it for the first time.