Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts

Sunday, May 29, 2022

May 29: G. K. Chesterton, English novelist and lay theologian

BORN MAY 29:

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English novelist, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, lay theologian, and critic. Some of his theological works, such as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, anticipate the point-of-view and style of C. S. Lewis. He wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, around 200 short stories, 4,000 essays (mostly as newspaper columns), and several plays. He also wrote articles for the 14th edition (1929) of the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humor. Among his more popular novels are The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which a randomly selected King of England enacts some inane laws, and a local young man--the eponymous "Napoleon"--exploits them; and The Man Who Was Thursday, a send-up of anarchism in which most of the leading anarchists turn out to be secret policemen meant to defeat anarchism. Most of us today, though, will know him for the Father Brown stories, often adapted for film, radio, TV, and other media.

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Wednesday, May 18, 2022

May 18: Bertrand Russell, British philosopher and mathematician

BORN MAY 18:

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and activist who wrote the Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, as well as a number of atheistic pieces such as What I Believe and Why I Am Not a Christian. He also wrote a wonderful History of Western Philosophy. Surprising, then, that given his skepticism, he received a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, which cited his "varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

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Tuesday, May 10, 2022

May 10: Karl Barth, Swiss theologian

BORN MAY 10:

Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a Swiss theologian known for his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans, and as part of the Confessing Church, which opposed Protestant cooperation with the Nazis. He was also working on an unfinished multi-volume Church Dogmatics. (The fourth of a planned five volumes was published mainly in note form, and the fifth was never started. What was finished was published in thirteen books.) His influence reached beyond theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Küng, and Reinhold Niebuhr, to novelists such as Flannery O'Connor and John Updike. A pastor like his father, he was also a university professor who lectured in the United States on a visit in 1962. In the same year he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

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Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Apr. 12: Francisco Garces, Spanish Franciscan missionary

BORN APRIL 12:

Name Francisco Garces (1738-1781) was a pioneering Spanish Franciscan missionary and explorer of northern Mexico, the American southwest, and both Californias. Born in Aragon in north-central Spain, he was ordained a priest in 1763. He was among the Franciscans who replaced the Jesuits when the King of Spain expelled them from his domains, and was assigned to the renowned Mission San Xavier del Bac now near Tucson, Arizona. (He was in the group of Franciscans that took charge of present-day Sonora, Mexico and Arizona, USA. Other Franciscans, under the doughty Junípero Serra, took Baja California and expanded into what is now the state of California, USA.) Not resting on his laurels, Garcés conducted extensive explorations in the Sonoran, Colorado, and Mojave Deserts, along the Gila River, and the Colorado River from the Gulf of California and Lower Colorado River Valley to the Grand Canyon, recording encounters with the Native American tribes along the way. Twice he traveled with the conquistador Juan Bautista de Anza, and also entered the San Joaquin Valley in 1776. With Juan Díaz he established two missions on the lower Colorado River near modern Yuma; in July 1781, he and his fellow friars were killed in a violent native uprising. He left behind two diaries (available online in English and Spanish), one covering the first de Anza expedition (January-July, 1774) and the other covering the second (October-December, 1776).

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Sunday, March 13, 2022

Mar. 13: Mircea Eliade, Romanian historian of religion

BORN MARCH 13:

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) Romanian historian of religion, philosopher, and fiction writer. Few thinkers have influenced my worldview as much as has Dr. Eliade (the advisor for my unfinished PhD had Eliade as his advisor for his PhD). His framing of religious thought in works like The Sacred and the Profane (the "two modes of being in the world") or The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History is as useful as anything I've encountered. The books are short but deep, and deserve (require!) rereading. His book Shamanism popularized that word in religious discourse in English; From Primitives to Zen is a collection of religious texts that go, well, from indigenous cultures to Zen Buddhism (but excluding Judaism and Christianity as already readily available). Eliade is a must-read for anyone interested in humanity's approaches to "that world."

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Monday, February 14, 2022

Feb. 14: James Albert Pike, American Episcopal priest

BORN FEBRUARY 14:

James Albert Pike (1913-1969) American civil servant and law professor who was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1946 and consecrated bishop in 1958. An early proponent of ordination of women and racial desegregation within mainline churches, he became increasingly radical in his views until at last he was accused of heresy by a small group of fellow bishops. He hosted his own television talk show and wrote seven books, the last of which (The Other Side) sealed his reputation as a nut job for its discussion of his experiences of seances and other paranormal phenomena following his son's suicide by gunshot. He died wandering in the Israeli desert after a vehicular breakdown on his way to Qumran to research "the historical Jesus."

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Sunday, February 13, 2022

Feb. 13: Elaine Pagels, American historian of religion

BORN FEBRUARY 13:

Elaine Pagels (1943 - ) is an American historian of religion at Princeton University, specializing in early Christianity and Gnosticism. Her 1979 best-seller The Gnostic Gospels opened the eyes of many to both the variety of thought available to early Christians and the viability of female scholars in the field. Later works include Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity, a radical view of attitudes toward women in religious history; and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, which contrasts Thomas with the Gospel of John.

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