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August 8
Katie Canon, Liu Liangmo, Larisa Bogoraz, and Saint Dominic
David Barnhart
August 08, 2025
Photo by Angela Barnhart, 2009.
Today marks the death, in 2018, of pioneering Black womanist theologian Katie Canon. She was also the first Black woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. Her work emphasized the theological importance of the lived experience of Black women.
Today also marks the death, in 1988, of Liu Liangmo, a Chinese evangelist and peace activist who resisted the Japanese invasion of China through mass singing. He was also spoke out against racism in the United States.
Today marks the birthday, in 1929, of Larisa Bogoraz, political activist in the Soviet Union who was sent to Siberia for four years for protesting against the trial of other political dissidents. She would outlive the USSR, and continued to advocate for human rights.
Today is the birthday and the Feast Day, in the Roman Catholic Church, of Saint Dominic, whose death we remembered the day before yesterday.
Reflection:
Katie Canon wrote:
“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.”
and
“To be a Black womanist ethicist places me in a most precarious predicament. On the one hand, my task as a Christian social ethicist is to transcend my blackness and femaleness and draft a blueprint of liberation ethics that speaks to… the universality of the human condition. On the other hand, my task as a womanist liberation ethicist is to debunk, unmask, and disentangle the historically conditioned value judgments and power relations [of] race, sex, and class oppression. Zora Neal Hurston described this dilemma as trying to hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.”
Prayer: God of incarnation, help us to understand the theological significant of our enfleshed bodies and our lived experience. What we do to other human bodies—to feed or starve them, to hurt or heal them, to humiliate or glorify them—we do to you. Amen.