Theologian's Almanac for Week of June 8, 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 8:
June 8 is Pentecost, the birth of the Christian church. Read SALT’s commentary on Pentecost here.
June 8 is also the birthday of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, in 1867. Wright would tell his students: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” He used natural building materials and finishes like stone and wood, never painting them, and his designs were horizontal, with low rooflines, so that the structures would blend in with the landscape (his famous “Falling Waters” house is pictured above). He designed several sacred spaces over his career, including Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, built in 1908 and now considered one of the first examples of modern architecture.
June 9 is the birthday of the novelist and peace activist Bertha von Suttner, born in Prague in 1843, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Suttner became a major figure in the peace movement of the day, publishing a bestselling novel, Lay Down Your Arms. She and her husband, Arthur, were devout Christians, and established the League Against Anti-Semitism in response to the pogroms and growing antisemitism in Eastern Europe. True religion, she wrote, is “neighborly love, not neighborly hatred. Any kind of hatred, against other nations or against other creeds, detracts from the humaneness of humanity.” For a short time she had served as administrative assistant to the industrialist Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune by inventing dynamite and developing weapons of war — and she maintained an extensive correspondence with him until his death. She is widely credited with influencing his decision to include a peace prize among those he established with his fortune, and in 1905, she became the first woman to be awarded it, and the second female Nobel laureate ever (the first being Marie Curie).
June 10 is the day in 1881 that Leo Tolstoy began a fateful pilgrimage to a nearby monastery. His great novels — War and Peace and Anna Karenina — had made him rich and famous, but he felt a hollow emptiness in his life, and fell into a deep depression. Then one day, alone on a walk in the woods, he had an epiphany: “At the thought of God, happy waves of life welled up inside me. Everything came alive, took on meaning. The moment I thought I knew God, I lived. But the moment I forgot him, the moment I stopped believing, I also stopped living.” The monastery became for him a place of spiritual retreat, a refuge where he worked out the implications of his conversion. He decided to renounce meat, sex, alcohol, tabacco, and expensive clothing. He wanted to give away all his money, too, but his wife, Sophia, reminded him that they needed at least some resources to raise their 10 children!
June 14 is the birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe, born in Connecticut in 1811. The daughter of Lyman Beecher, a well known Congregationalist minister, Harriet’s ministry would take a literary form: in 1852, her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, became a national sensation. One of the bestselling novels of all time, the novel was for many an eye-opening, unsparing, tragic depiction of the evils of slavery, and a vision that helped galvanize the abolitionist movement.
June 14 is also Flag Day in the United States, the anniversary of the declaration by Congress on June 14, 1777, that “the flag of the United States be 13 stripes, alternate red and white,” and that “the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” During the revolutionary war against the British, each state’s military regiment was often fighting under its own flag, and George Washington wanted a common, national flag instead, for both practical and aspirational reasons. Thus the roots of the holiday go back to the need for national unity and cooperation, and to the idea that this “new constellation” of states can only face our greatest challenges if we do so by working together.
June 14 this year is also the 79th birthday of Donald J. Trump, as well as the 250th anniversary of the formation of the United States Army (then called the “Continental Army”) in 1775. To mark the day this year, a grand military parade is scheduled in Washington, D.C. (ostensibly to celebrate the latter anniversary, but by implication the former one as well). That massive spectacle is estimated to cost some 50 million dollars, and in addition, to cause some 16 million dollars of damage to the city’s roads and infrastructure. Accordingly, hundreds of protest events (many dubbed “No Kings Day”) are scheduled in cities and towns all over the country, both to sound the alarm about rising authoritarianism and to recall that the American Revolution, including the army constituted 250 years ago, was fought in order to wrest power from an authoritarian system and vest it more broadly in the people, all of whom (all of us!) are “created equal.”