Theologian's Almanac for Week of June 28, 2026

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 28:

June 28 is the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, now considered a galvanizing and symbolic event in the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Police raided the Stonewall Inn bar, on the pretext that the bar was selling alcohol without a liquor license — but it was the third raid in a row on a Greenwich Village gay bar, and this time, the outraged patrons didn’t disperse, but rather gathered on the street and actively resisted the police. The ensuing unrest lasted five days, and inspired activism around the country. On the first anniversary of the uprising, the inaugural gay pride parades were held in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.

In honor of Pride Month, here’s SALT’s reflection on Homosexuality and the Bible.

June 28 is also the feast day of St. Irenaeus, the second-century Bishop of Lyons, who famously wrote, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

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, the country’s 250th birthday. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, thus officially breaking from what the founders declared was authoritarian British rule, the rule of a tyrant, to be replaced by the the power of “we the people,” as the United States Constitution would later put it. In that sense, the document declares independence from tyranny itself: not only from the particular tyrant, King George III, but from any and all tyrants (or aspiring tyrants) who might come after him. 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!

And looking ahead:

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!). Thus for the first time in Western thought, the celestial world and the terrestrial world were conceived as one pattern of motion — and for Newton, this vision was simultaneously scientific and theological. “This most beautiful System” could only proceed from God, he wrote, and the universe’s elegance, grandeur, and consistency exist 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.

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. 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!