Theologian's Almanac for Week of January 14, 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 14:

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 against nuclear weapons and foreign interference in the Congo (today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Schweitzer was criticized during his lifetime, and also after his death, for failing to sufficiently modernize the Lambaréné hospital, and even more seriously, for the occasional racist, paternalistic ideas (conceiving Africans as “children,” for example) woven through his writings. in the end, his legacy is strikingly mixed: in so many respects, including his critique of European colonialism, Albert Schweitzer transcended the prevailing prejudices of his time; but when it came to certain racist, paternalistic tropes, he did not.

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 15 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, observed annually on the third Monday of January, honoring the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The day became a national holiday in 1986, and is often observed with service projects, a public concert, and/or a prayer breakfast. Here’s SALT’s free film honoring the occasion this year (just click the “Download” button underneath the film on Vimeo); it’s especially powerful now, in the wake of last week’s third anniversary of the horrific events at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

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 (author of the novel, “White Noise,” the basis of the new movie), 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.