- This is the Day
- Posts
- April 21
April 21
Sister Helen Prejean, Peter Abelard, Saint Anselm of Canterbury, and Nina Simone
David Barnhart
April 21, 2025
Pelican. San Carlos, Mexico, June 2022. Own photo.
Today is the birthday, in 1939, of Sister Helen Prejean, a noted advocate against the death penalty. She is one of the saints who is still with us.
It is also the birthday, in 1838, of John Muir, naturalist and conservationist. In addition to helping establish National Parks and founding the Sierra Club, he promoted new ways of thinking practically and spiritually about preservation and stewardship of the more-than-human world.
Today marks the death of Peter Abelard, in 1142. He was a traveling theologian who became an advocate of the Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement, meaning that salvation comes by following Christ’s teaching and example. He and his wife, Heloise, became major figures in Christian ethics.
Today is also the feast day of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, who also died on this day in 1109. In contrast to Abelard, he articulated the Satisfaction Theory of the Atonement. I don’t mind saying that I find Abelard’s atonement more satisfying than Anselm’s, but I recognize the importance of both. The problem is that Anselm’s theory has been weaponized into the evangelical version we have today, which imagines a God whose “love” looks a lot like hate, and who winds up saving us from the horrors that God wants to inflict on us by damning us to hell.
Today also marks the death of Nina Simone, in 2003, musician and civil rights activist. Her mother was a Methodist minister and she was baptized into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. She was drawn to music by listening to Bach, but when racism closed the doors
Reflection:
Peter Abelard wrote
“The key to wisdom is this: constant and frequent questioning. For by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.”
Sister Helen Prejean wrote
“In sorting out my feelings and beliefs, there is… one piece of moral ground of which I am absolutely certain: if I were to be murdered I would not want my murderer executed. I would not want my death avenged. Especially by a government… which can't be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.”
John Muir wrote:
“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
Some of the lyrics to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn”
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer
She also said
“You have to learn to get up from the table when love is no longer being served.”
Prayer: Source and End of our prayers, even when we stop believing in prayer, life finds us addressing ourselves to you. You must be love, or you would not be God. So, Love, bring yourself to this world that so desperately needs you. Amen.