Theologian's Almanac for Week of June 29, 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, June 29:
June 29 is the birthday of French writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born in Lyon, France, in 1900. He’s best known today for his 1943 novella, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), the beloved classic exploring friendship, loneliness, and big philosophical ideas. Saint-Exupéry painted the watercolors for the book, which was posthumously published — after his plane mysteriously disappeared on a secret mission during WWII. Saint-Exupéry wrote, “All grown-ups were once children — although few of them remember it.” And again: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
June 30 is the anniversary of a formal public debate over the theory of evolution at Oxford University in England, held by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, had just appeared the previous year, to immediate controversy. The distinguished biologist Richard Owen was a vocal critic, as was Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, with Owen’s help. On the pro-Darwin side were several scientists, including Thomas Henry Huxley, and also several theologians, including Baden Powell, a mathematician and priest. It’s too seldom remembered that theology has been on both sides of this debate from the beginning! (And by the way, by most accounts, the pro-Darwin scientists and theologians won the Oxford debate.)
June 30 is also the birthday of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, born in Szetejnie, Lithuania, in 1911. Traveling with his father through Russia, Milosz was fascinated by the region’s different religions: Catholicism, Greek Orthodox and Protestant Christianity, Judaism, and pagan mysticism. He translated many books of the Bible into Polish, and was particularly fascinated by the Book of Job and the Psalms. Asked how he arrived at faith in God, he said, "It's not up to me to know anything about heaven or hell. But in this world, there is too much ugliness and horror. [And this observation implies that] there must be, somewhere, goodness and truth. And that means somewhere God must be."
July 1 is the birthday of French novelist George Sand, born Lucile Aurore Dupin in Paris, France, in 1804. Growing up, she was educated in an English convent in Paris, experienced a conversion, and decided to become a nun. Other girls dubbed her, “Saint Aurore.” But when her grandmother heard about her plans, she promptly withdrew her from the school. Writing under the pseudonym, “George Sand,” she became a prolific writer and a scandalous public figure, wearing men’s clothing, smoking cigars, and falling in love — including a relationship with the pianist Frédéric Chopin. Looking back on her life, she put it this way: “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.”
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 what the founders declared was authoritarian English rule, to be replaced by the the power of “we the people,” as the United States Constitution would later put it. The day the Declaration 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 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.”