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August 30
Saint Fiacre, Fred Hampton, Anna Politkovskaya, and William Barber II
David Barnhart
August 30, 2025
Moonflower, which opened just last week. Own photo.
On or about this date, in the year 70, Roman armies destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
Today is the Feast Day of Saint Fiacre, an Irish monk who lived in France and became the patron saint of gardeners. He died on August 18, 670.
Today is the birthday, in 1948, of Fred Hampton, a leader in the Black Panther Party and founder of the Rainbow coalition who was targeted by the FBI and Chicago police and assassinated in a raid in 1969.
Today is also the birthday, in 1958, of Anna Politkovskaya, Russian journalist who reported on the war in Chechnya. She kept truth-telling even though the government tried multiple ways to silence her. Putin’s henchmen assassinated her on October 6, 2006, though he has maintained, as he has always done, plausible deniability for ordering it.
Today is the birthday, in 1963, of William Barber II, a Disciples of Christ pastor and creator of the “Moral Mondays” Movement in North Carolina which protested the growing white supremacist threat of voter suppression in 2013. He went on to found Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He has been arrested multiple times for protesting, along with other clergy who have been raising the alarm about our slide toward fascism, and has been calling the church to be faithful to its prophetic ministry.
Reflection:
Fred Hampton said:
“We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
Anna Politkovskaya wrote, in what sounds like a prophetic warning for our times:
“Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?”
Anna Politkovskaya warned the world about Putin’s rise to power. She wrote:
“This political line is wholly neo-Soviet: human beings do not have independent existences, they are cogs in the machine whose function is to implement unquestioningly whatever political escapades those in power dream up. Cogs have no rights. Not even to dignity in death.”
Some choice quotes from Rev. William Barber, II:
“When faith and church becomes merely a place for privatized religion and privatized salvation and privatized relationship with the divine, it is actually counter to Scripture. Jesus said that nations would be judged for how we treat the poor, the sick, the stranger, the immigrants and the least of these.”
“Republicans have racialized poverty, and Democrats have run from poverty. And we’re forcing them to deal with the reality. We are very political, but we’re not partisan... There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world... All the victories we enjoy today—voting rights, Social Security, minimum wage—100 years ago were seen as virtually impossible...Everything we won, people had to start winning in the midst of opposition that looked like it was overwhelming. I believe that’s the moment we’re in right now.”
Prayer: God, we seem to be more disconnected than every in this hyperconnected world. Move us instead toward global consciousness, that humanity may act as an intelligent and mature species that cares for the least, instead of an angry, frightened, and selfish creature. Amen.