November 17

Gregory Thaumaturgus, Robert Owen, Audre Lorde, and International Students' Day

Author

David Barnhart
November 17, 2025

Pond life, 2023. Own photo.

Today is International Students’ Day, which commemorates the day Nazis executed nine Czech students for protesting in 1939. 

Today is the feast day of Gregory Thaumaturgus, or “Wonder-Worker,” who was a disciple of Origen, one of the first major Christian theologians. He died in 270. 

Today marks the death, in 1858, of Robert Owen, a Welsh philosopher of utopia and a major figure in the development of progressive ideas about labor and co-operative businesses during the Industrial Age. 

Today marks the death, in 1992, of Audre Lorde, who described herself as a “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet.” Her writings have inspired generations of freedom workers. 

Reflection:

Robert Owen wrote: 

“I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity — not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour — but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.”

and

“What ideas individuals may attach to the term "Millennium" I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.”

Audre Lorde wrote: 

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

and

“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

Prayer: God, our imaginations are so constrained by business-as-usual it is difficult for us to see alternative ways of living. Make us truly free in our minds as well as our social and political relations. Amen.