Theologian's Almanac for Week of September 3, 2023
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, September 3:
September 3 is the date in 1838 that Frederick Douglass, disguised as a sailor, boarded a train to escape from enslavement. He went on to become a tireless advocate for abolition, as well as for women’s suffrage; in 1848, Douglass was one of the original signatories of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments.” “I love that religion,” he wrote, “which sends its votaries to bind up the wounds of those who have fallen among thieves.” And again: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened around his own neck.”
September 3 is also the birthday of anthropologist, naturalist, and author Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1907. In poetic, evocative prose, he wrote a series of books that inspired a generation of nature writers, including The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and The Star Thrower (1979). His essay, “How Flowers Changed the World,” is a little masterpiece, and a classic example of Eiseley’s knack for evoking creation’s wonder: "The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs…"
September 4 is Labor Day this year, an occasion often celebrated around the world on May 1, International Workers’ Day. In 1884, President Grover Cleveland and the U.S. Congress established the American holiday in early September instead of early May for at least two reasons: first, to distance it from May Day protests and their radical demands (such as the eight-hour work day!), and second, to assuage an angry labor movement in the wake of the government’s brutal suppression of the Pullman railway strike.
Many religious groups supported the workers: in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things,” an encyclical addressing labor practices, now considered a foundational document of Catholic social teaching. Leo wrote of a moral obligation to pay a fair and living wage, addressing employers directly: “be mindful of this — that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.”
September 4 is also the feast day of Saint Rose of Viterbo, born in Viterbo, Italy, in 1234. At 8 years old she had a vision of Mary calling her to take up the Franciscan habit, but to live at home. By the age of 12 she was a renowned preacher in the streets of Viterbo — but because she often preached against emperor, Frederick II, she and her family were exiled. She was refused admission to the local Poor Clares’ convent of St. Mary of the Roses because (ironically enough, given the name of the convent!) she lacked a dowry, but she nevertheless lived a religious life on her own until her untimely death at age 18. Pope Alexander IV ordered her to be buried with honors in the very convent that had refused her admission. Because of her name, she is sometimes associated with flowers in central Italy, and she is the patron saint of people in exile.
September 4 is also the day in 1957 that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus summoned the National Guard to bar nine black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. President Dwight D. Eisenhower then sent in the 101st Airborne Division to ensure the students could enroll. In an address to the nation, Eisenhower put it this way: “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.” Today is a day to remember the courage and dignity of the “Little Rock Nine” — and at the same time, to recall and reflect on the “Little Rock Thousand,” the mob of approximately one thousand white people who surrounded Central High School, shouting ugly epithets as the soldiers ushered the nine teenagers into the building.
September 6 is the birthday of American social reformer Jane Addams, born in 1860. When she was 29 years old, she co-founded Chicago’s first settlement house, Hull-House, in a part of the city populated mostly by immigrants from Poland, Mexico, Greece, Russia, and Bohemia. Hull-House grew to serve more than 2,000 people a week, offering a night school for adults, a public kitchen, girls club, bathhouse, gym, and music school; accordingly, today Addams is considered the “Mother of Social Services” in the United States.
Underneath her work was a deep commitment to faith and scripture: she was an avid reader, and was persuaded by the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Leo Tolstoy to explore the Bible as a source of conviction. Addams drew inspiration from the New Testament Gospels, and in particular from the Sermon on the Mount’s “Beatitudes.” At every turn, she interpreted scripture through the lens of action, insisting that “action is the only medium” we have “for receiving and appropriating truth.” In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
September 8 is the day in 1504 that Michelangelo unveiled his astonishing sculpture, David. Some four decades earlier, a colossal, misshapen block of marble — more than 19 feet high — was imperfectly quarried and then delivered to the sculptor Agostino di Duccio, along with the commission to create a biblical figure for one of the buttresses of a Florence cathedral. The block was unwieldy, and Duccio gave up after a rough attempt at carving some feet and legs; the commission then passed on to Antonio Rossellino, who also conceded defeat.
The abandoned slab lay in a field in Florence for thirty years; locals dubbed it “the Giant.” When church authorities revived the project in 1501, the commission went to the young, ambitious Michelangelo — who promptly built a shed around the Giant, and got to work. When the sculpture was at last unveiled for public viewing, it must have seemed a miracle: the dirty, twisted Giant had become an elegant, beautiful man, the ancient Shepherd King of Israel. Michelangelo didn’t battle the block’s imperfect dimensions, but rather used them to create the figure’s signature pose.
Michelangelo later said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” And again: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
September 8 is also celebrated as the birthday of Mary, mother of Jesus, the young woman who boldly sang of a revolutionary God turning the world upside down, who taught Jesus about the world, who stayed with him until the bitter end, presided over the windswept gathering at the first Pentecost — and became known in Eastern Christianity as Theotokos, “the house of God.”
[Coming Attractions: SALT’s now putting the finishing touches on two Advent resources, both focused on Mary: a poster-plus-activity-book for families of all shapes and sizes; and a devotional for adults, organized around Mary and other magnificent women in the Bible. Stay tuned!]
September 9 is the birthday of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, author of two of the world’s most renowned novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). After a raucous youth, Tolstoy’s experiences as a soldier profoundly changed his spiritual views, planting seeds for his commitment to Christian pacifism and nonviolence, which went on to influence Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.