Theologian's Almanac for Week of January 10, 2021
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, January 10:
January 10 is the day in 1901 — exactly 120 years ago — that the United States’ first true oil gusher erupted. It happened at Spindletop, just outside Beaumont, Texas, and is now widely considered the beginning of the petroleum age. Before 1901, oil was mostly used for lamps, but after Spindletop, virtually overnight, it became the cheapest fuel available. In the decades that followed, an entire economy — an entire way of life — was built around petroleum, from gasoline to heating to plastics, with monumental consequences for the planet.
January 11 is the birthday of writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold, born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887. After nearly 20 years of working in the U.S. Forest Service, he became a professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, and bought an old farm on the Wisconsin River — where he wrote the essays collected in A Sand County Almanac. He struggled to publish the collection for seven years; it was at last published posthumously in 1949, going largely unnoticed until a paperback edition became a surprise bestseller in the 1970s, in the midst of the emerging environmental movement. It’s now considered a classic manifesto of ecological thinking: “A thing is right,” Leopold argued, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” What he called his “land ethic” continues to inspire today, and his essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which he describes the death of a wolf, is legendary. “Harmony with land,” he wrote, “is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.”
January 11 is also the birthday of American philosopher and psychologist William James, born in New York City in 1842. In his Varieties of Religious Experience, James applied a sympathetic, rigorous eye to the experiential side of religion in its manifold forms, and his philosophical turn toward what he called “pragmatism” cleared new ground for the intellectual integrity of religious doctrine. Rather than evaluating an idea strictly in terms of the material evidence for or against its particular claims, Pragmatism instead focuses on the idea’s practical outcomes in the lives of those who believe it. If those outcomes are good, then the idea may rightly be called “true.” This approach is especially suited for ideas or situations (as James argued in his famous essay, “The Will to Believe”) in which immediate material evidence is either unavailable or inconclusive. And as it turns out, a great deal of life has this open-ended character, and so a “pragmatic” approach is frequently fitting. To borrow a line from the Sermon on the Mount: “You will know them by their fruits…” (Matt 7:16).
January 13 is the day in 1968 that Johnny Cash and June Carter performed live at Folsom Prison in California. The duo had long wanted to play Cash’s 1957 song, “Folsom Prison Blues,” for those incarcerated there. Just before the day of the concert, a prison chaplain asked the musicians if they would listen to an original song, “Greystone Chapel,” written by Glen Sherley, who was in Folsom serving a 5-to-life sentence for burglary; the chaplain’s idea was if they could simply mention the song from the stage, it would lift Sherley’s spirits. Cash and Carter liked the song so much that they insisted on including it in the concert itself. The live album hit Number 1 on the country charts, and was a pop crossover as well, giving a second wind to Cash’s and Carter’s careers. It became the first of several live albums they performed in prisons. The Library of Congress selected it as one of 50 recordings to be added to the National Registry of Music in 2003.
Cash said: "You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space."
January 14 is the birthday of theologian, musician, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, born in Kaysersberg, in present-day France, in 1875. A musical prodigy and expert on Bach, Schweitzer decided at the age of 21 to spend his twenties devoted to music, art, science, and religion — and then, at the age of 30, to devote the rest of life to humanitarian work. On his 30th birthday, he resolved to become a medical missionary, and enrolled in medical school. His wife, Helene, earned a nursing degree, and the couple eventually relocated to West Africa, where they set up a hospital in Lambaréné, in present-day Gabon — funding the construction with money Schweitzer had saved from giving organ concerts. They conceived this work not as charity but as a small gesture of reparations for the evils of European colonialism. Along the way, Schweitzer also published two influential theological books, one on the search for “the historical Jesus,” and one on the Apostle Paul, arguing that mystical union with Christ, not “justification by faith,” is actually Paul’s central idea.
The hospital in Lambaréné was rustic, with no phones or radios, and most work being done by the light of kerosene lamps. Schweitzer’s compassion extended to all God’s creatures: he was a committed vegetarian, even refusing to kill insects. Animals were allowed to roam freely on the hospital grounds, and famously, a hippo once wandered into the vegetable garden.
In 1952, nearly 40 years after he and Helene had set out for Lambaréné, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, both for his humanitarian work and his philosophy/theology of what he called “Reverence for Life.” The Schweitzers used the prize money to expand the hospital, adding a treatment center and housing for people with leprosy. Schweitzer’s Nobel lecture, entitled “The Problem of Peace,” is today considered one of the finest speeches of the twentieth century. It includes these lines: “What really matters is that we should all of us realize that we are guilty of inhumanity. The horror of this realization should shake us out of our lethargy so that we can direct our hopes and our intentions to the coming of an era in which war will have no place.” In his remaining years, Schweitzer campaigned tirelessly against nuclear weapons and foreign interference in the Congo (today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. A fourth-generation Baptist preacher, King was a 25-year-old pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, recently married and with a newborn daughter at home, when a local woman named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Though Parks would later be described as “an old woman tired after a long day of work,” in fact she was a 42-year-old NAACP leader, activist, and organizer. As she later put it, “No, the only ‘tired’ I was, was tired of giving in.”
The Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, had been thinking about organizing a bus boycott, and since Parks was so widely respected in the community, they decided to rally around her case. Four days after the arrest, Robinson and her colleagues formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee and coordinate the boycott. It was Robinson who nominated her church’s young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., as a potential leader for the effort.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was originally conceived to be brief, but in the end it lasted over 380 days. Participants faced all kinds of resistance, including harassment, intimidation, and terrorism: many homes and churches, including King’s parsonage, were bombed by white supremacists. In 1956, the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional. The boycott vaulted King into a national civil rights leader; he was 27 years old.
In 1963, at the age of 34, King delivered what is arguably the most famous speech of the twentieth century at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He stirringly spoke of having “a dream” for America, but the heart of the speech was about how African American civil rights were being nightmarishly, systematically denied, from police brutality to housing discrimination to segregation. And in 1967, King linked the civil rights movement to the peace movement, arguing that the Vietnam War disproportionately burdened soldiers who were often poor young men of color; that it drained resources away from important domestic social programs; and that it was an unjust war in any case, largely targeting poor people in Vietnam. He began organizing a “Poor People’s Campaign” to combat economic inequality in the United States. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated just outside his Memphis motel room, having travelled to Memphis to lead a march in solidarity with striking garbage workers.
King said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
January 16 is the birthday of American writer Mary Karr, born in Groves, Texas, in 1955. Her third memoir, Lit, published in 2009, is about both her struggle with addiction and her conversion to Catholicism that helped her move into recovery. Karr rewrote the book twice, throwing out over a thousand finished pages before starting over on page one. Near despair, she called her close friend, the writer Don DeLillo, for advice and encouragement, and he sent her a postcard with three words on it: “Write or Die.” Karr responded with her own three-word postcard: “Write and Die.” She was deeply anxious that a book about her spiritual life wouldn’t be well received by her fans, who by then were accustomed to the rowdy, sometimes racy style in her previous two memoirs, The Liar’s Club and Cherry. She said, “Talking about spiritual activity to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio.” Lit became a New York Times bestseller.