If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available, along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Click here.
Some days from the church calendar -
ok- I got mixed up last week and already gave you CS Lewis and Catherine, Barbara, and Margaret. For the rest of the week -
Nov 26 – Isaac Watts He wrote Joy To The World, along with 750 or so other hymns. He wrote translations of the psalms into “New Testament language” and set to standard hymn meters.
Nov 26 – Sojourner Truth – she was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. She became an abolitionist and activist for women’s rights. Her most famous speech is known as Ain’t I a Woman.
Nov 28 – First Sunday of Advent, and thus a feast Day of The Lord. If it were not, it would be a day for Kamehameha and Emma, King and Queen of Hawaii. Why, we might ask, do we in particular remember a king and queen of Hawaii? Well, “In 1860, Queen Emma and King Kamehameha IV petitioned the Church of England to help establish the Church of Hawaii. Upon the arrival of Anglican bishop Thomas Nettleship Staley and two priests, they both were baptized on October 21, 1862 and confirmed in November 1862. With her husband, she championed the Anglican (Episcopal) church in Hawaii and founded St. Andrew's Cathedral, raising funds for the building. In 1867 she founded Saint Andrew's Priory School for Girls.[19] She also laid the groundwork for an Episcopal secondary school for boys originally named for Saint Alban, and later ʻIolani School in honor of her husband.” Wikipedia
Some days from the earth/world calendar -
Nov 23
+ Dr Who premiered in 1963.
Nov 24
+ John Knox died in 1572. He was a Scottish reformer and called the founder of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. As a reformer, he was often caught up in Protestant-Catholic controversies and forced to move from country to country. While in exile in England, “he was licensed to work in the Church of England, where he rose in the ranks to serve King Edward VI of England as a royal chaplain. He exerted a reforming influence on the text of the Book of Common Prayer.” So one might ask why the Church of England does not recognize him with a day in the calendar. Well, “Knox was notable not so much for the overthrow of Roman Catholicism in Scotland, but for assuring the replacement of the established Christian religion with Presbyterianism rather than Anglicanism.” Might have something to do with it, but then I’m a United Methodist and don’t really know about these things!
+ DB Cooper hijacked a plane and parachuted out with $200,000 in 1971. Here’s something I didn’t know – his name wasn’t really DB Cooper. He bought the ticket under the name Dan Cooper and somehow that got twisted in the media to “D.B. Cooper”. The Wikipedia article lists 14 different possible suspects!
+ Scott Joplin was born on this day in 1867. Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer, and over 100 other piano rags. He wrote two operas – the first was A Guest of Honor about the 1901 White House dinner hosted by President Theodore Roosevelt for the civil rights leader and educator Booker T. Washington. The event was politically polarizing, with Roosevelt receiving an uncommon level of criticism from his political opponents for entertaining the African-American leader. Unfortunately while touring, the company was robbed, the score was confiscated when Joplin could not pay the hotel bill, and subsequently lost. The second opera was Treemonisha, about an educator kidnapped by a band of conjurers. It really wasn’t produced until 1972; Joplin received a posthumous Pulitzer prize for music for it in 1976
Nov 25
+ It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States.
+ In 1960, three Dominican sisters opposed to the Trujillo dictatorship were killed and the deaths made to look like an accident. In part because of this -
+ in 1999 the UN declared Nov 25 as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. (Actually they declared it on Dec 17, Nov 25, 2000 would have been the first one, I guess.) Seems like we have a way to go…..
+ Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835. At one time he was the richest man in America. He gave away $350,000,000, including $6,000,000 to provide 7689 church organs, “to lessen the pain of the sermons.”
Nov 26
+ Buy Nothing Day Need I say more?
+ Casablanca premiered in 1942. “Here’s looking at you, kid”
Nov 27
+ James Agee was born in 1909. He wrote “a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.” Wow!
+ the Nobel Prizes were established in 1895, when Alfred Nobel bequeathed a fund for granting prizes in literature, physiology, chemistry, physics, medicine, and the promotion of peace.
+ First Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924
Nov 28
+ Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean in 1520. Only one of the five ships that sety out made it all the way around the world, and Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines, but his voyage proved that the world is round and predominantly water.
So first Sunday in Advent – doing an Advent Calendar/Wreathe this year? Time to start thinking about it. I always think I should do daily devotions during Advent. We did when I was a child, but I don’t seem to carry it off too consistently these days. Maybe this year – I’ll let you know.
That’s what I got for now…..
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