Theologian's Almanac for Week of January 7, 2024

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 7:

January 7 is the day many churches will celebrate Epiphany this year (and Orthodox Christians will celebrate Christmas!). Epiphany means "showing forth." Historically, the day (officially January 6) has included the celebration of three things, all of which are considered key moments — key “firsts,” we might say — in which Jesus’ true identity shows forth: the visit of the Magi, Jesus’ baptism, and Jesus’ first canonical miracle of turning water into wine during the Wedding at Cana. Check out SALT’s commentary for Epiphany, including Jesus’ baptism, here.

And speaking of “Showings,” here’s an excerpt from Julian of Norwich’s book of that same name (also sometimes called “Revelations of Divine Love”), first published in 1373, the earliest surviving book by a woman in the English language.

January 10 is the day in 1901 — just 123 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 to polyester, with monumental consequences for the planet. Last year, 2023, was the hottest year in recorded human history (and the last nine years are the nine hottest ever recorded), a warming of the biosphere decisively driven by the blanket of pollution created by the burning of fossil fuels — such as petroleum.

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 measurable evidence for or against it, Pragmatism instead focuses on the idea’s practical outcomes in the lives of those who believe it. If those outcomes are good and beneficial for all concerned, 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 measurable evidence is either unavailable or inconclusive. And as it turns out, a great deal of life has this unmeasurable, 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 June Carter and Johnny Cash 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.

Carter said: “Never underestimate the power of a kind word or a gentle touch.”

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."