Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 2, 2025
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, November 2:
November 2 is the Sunday many churches will celebrate All Saints' Day (officially November 1), a festival celebrating all the saints, known and unknown. Here’s SALT’s commentary on this year’s All Saints’ Day passage from the Gospels (in some churches, All Saints Day is celebrated on the first Sunday in November): Luke’s version of Jesus’ famous teaching, the Beatitudes.
November 2 is also All Souls’ Day, honoring those who have died (especially relatives).
The period from October 31 through November 2 is sometimes called “Allhallowtide.” And in communities of Mexican heritage, many celebrate this period as encompassing the Dia de los Muertos, “The Day of the Dead,” a time to gather in order to pray, remember, and commune with friends and family members who have died.
November 4 is Election Day in the United States. If you can, vote! And here’s SALT’s special podcast episode, “Politics, the Bible, and the 2024 Election“ (the arguments still apply in 2025!).
November 6 is the birthday of American poet Anne Porter, born in Sherborn, Massachusetts, in 1911. She wrote poems avidly as a young woman, often on theological subjects or inflected with a spiritual sensibility, but submitted only a few for publication. She and her husband, the painter Fairfield Porter, were active in the New York art scene of the 1940s and ’50s, and he painted many portraits of her over the course of their life together, living on Long Island and raising five children. After Fairfield’s death, Anne turned again to her poems and began revising them anew. A dear friend, the poet David Shapiro, secretly showed the drafts to a press — who promptly offered to publish them, and Anne agreed. An Altogether Different Language appeared in 1994, when Anne was 83 years old; it was named a finalist for the National Book Award.
Here’s her classic, “Music.” And here’s that original collection’s title poem, a meditation on St. Francis’ little stone chapel in Assisi:
“An Altogether Different Language”
There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion,
Already old eight hundred years ago.
It was abandoned and in disrepair
But it was called St. Mary of the Angels
For it was known to be the haunt of angels,
Often at night the country people
Could hear them singing there.
What was it like, to listen to the angels,
To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices
Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion
In hymns of joy?
No one has told us.
Perhaps it needs another language
That we have still to learn,
An altogether different language.
November 8 is the birthday of American activist and writer Dorothy Day, born in 1897. After a time as a radical journalist and activist in New York City, she converted to Catholicism and, along with the French Catholic activist Peter Maurin, began a publication called The Catholic Worker devoted to issues of justice, poverty, and human rights. The first issue, in 1933, cost one penny — and it still does today. In that inaugural edition, Day wrote that the paper was “For those who are sitting on park benches in the warm spring sunlight. For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain. For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile search for work.” The discussions provoked by The Catholic Worker led to the creation of “houses of hospitality” in New York City and across the country, where people without homes, especially women, could seek shelter, companionship, and assistance.
Here’s a reflection on the heart of her work, which Day wrote in June of 1946 under the title, “Love is the Measure.”
Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, published in 1952, is a modern classic. She said, “My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the Psalms.”
November 8 is also the day that Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was founded in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1837. In those days, though there were 120 men’s colleges in America, there were virtually no equivalents for women. Mary Lyon, a teacher and chemist, thought that ought to change. She wrote to a friend, “It is desirable that the plans relating to the subject should not seem to originate with us but with benevolent gentlemen. If the object should excite attention, there is danger that many good men will fear the effect on society of so much female influence, and what they will call female greatness.” But the men she hired to fundraise couldn’t get the job done — so Lyon did it herself, raising $27,000 from 1,800 donors in churches, farms, sewing circles and other gatherings (an amount equivalent to over $900,000 today!). Mount Holyoke’s inaugural class was 80 young women, some having travelled for days to reach South Hadley. Each brought a Bible, an atlas, a dictionary, and two spoons.