Theologian's Almanac for Week of July 2, 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, July 2:

July 2 is the birthday of American lawyer, activist, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908. As a lawyer, Marshall made the argument — in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 — that the doctrine of “separate but equal” was a contradiction in terms. “Equal,” Marshall insisted, “means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.” In 1967, Marshall became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court.

July 2 is also the birthday of Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. In his mid-30s, he traveled to India and studied Eastern religions — which inspired his novel, Siddhartha, about the early life of Buddha. He said, "The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it."

July 4 is Independence Day in the United States. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, thus officially breaking from English rule. The day the document was actually signed was two days earlier, and accordingly, John Adams thought July 2 was the country’s genuine birthday — and so refused to participate in Fourth of July celebrations for the rest of his life. Ironically, he died on July 4, 1826 — as did Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary author.

Here’s SALT’s reflection on Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” the poem engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Happy Fourth!

July 5 is the day in 1687 that Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (now often referred to simply as “the Principia”), one of the most extraordinary, influential books in the history of science. It includes Newton’s three laws of motion: first, "Objects in motion tend to remain in motion" (inertia); second, “An object’s acceleration depends on its mass and the amount of force applied to it” (force); and third, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" (action and reaction). Perhaps most remarkably, largely by way of these laws, Newton unified celestial and terrestrial motion under a single framework; since Aristotle they had been thought to be two distinct realms. On the contrary, Newton argued, gravity determines both the movements of the planets around the Sun and the motions of ordinary objects on Earth (like a falling apple, as the apocryphal story goes!). For Newton, the book was at once scientific and theological: “This most beautiful System” could only proceed from God, he wrote, and the universe’s elegance, grandeur, and consistency are because “God is the same God, always and everywhere.”

July 6 is the birthday of the Dalai Lama, born in 1935 in Taktser, Tibet. Since 1960, he has lived in exile as a refugee in India, and has worked to bring a nonviolent end to the conflict between Tibet and China. For his efforts and philosophy of peace grounded in Buddhism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The Dalai Lama has said, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”

And again: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

July 6 is also the day in 1942 when Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam, hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex until they were discovered and captured in 1944 — an ordeal she wrote about in her diary, which became a classic. With poignant, devastating irony, she wrote: “The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be alone with the sky, nature and God. For only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity.”

July 7 is the birthday of Jewish artist Marc Chagall, born in 1887 in present-day Belarus (then part of Russia). He studied art in St. Petersburg, in Paris — and in the United States, to which he received a visa in 1941 after the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City included Chagall’s name on a list of more than one thousand artists at risk of Nazi persecution. Appropriately enough, one of his major works is the “Peace Window,” a stained-glass masterpiece at the United Nations headquarters in New York (pictured above). He also spent more than two decades on 105 etchings for an edition of the Bible, at last published in 1956. Likewise, many of Chagall’s major paintings explore biblical stories in his dreamlike, phantasmagorical style, influenced by both Judaism and Christianity, and may be viewed in the Chagall Museum in Nice, France.

July 7 is also the day in 1946 that Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini became the first United States citizen to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Originally from Italy, she is the founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart — and her work in the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries focused on serving neglected, mistreated immigrants, particularly Italian Americans.

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The Theologian’s Almanac is going on its annual summer sabbatical. See you in August!