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August 5
Mary Ritter Beard, Wendell Berry, and James Cone
David Barnhart
August 05, 2025
Photo by Angela Barnhart, 2008.
Today is the birthday, in 1876, of Mary Ritter Beard, women’s suffrage activist, labor rights activist, and women’s historian who criticized the patriarchal way our history is (still) taught. Along with her husband, Charles Beard, she shaped the critical examination of labor, class, and women’s history.
Today is also the birthday, in 1934, of Wendell Berry, poet and environmental activist, whose work often emphasizes spiritual connection to the land.
Today is the birthday of James Cone, in 1938, a giant in Black theology whose death we remember on April 28.
Reflection:
Mary Ritter Beard wrote:
“The labor movement is more than an economic enterprise or a field for energetic leadership. It has a deep social and spiritual significance. It draws men and women together in a great cooperative undertaking which grows in strength day and night and develops ideals of peace and well-being in society as well as practical contests of force.”
and especially relevant for our current fascist regime:
“Cultural sociology, the larger view, reveals in elaborate studies how, from primitive times to the modern era, societies have been organized with reference to the supreme functions of life-its continuance, care, and protection. Societies that are not so organized, it shows, are robber bands exploiting other societies until inevitable degeneration sets in.”
A small piece of Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”:
…Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Prayer: God, help us to practice resurrection. Thank you for every sign of new life and resistance to systems of domination. Amen.