- This is the Day
- Posts
- September 24
September 24
Josué de Castro, Guru Ram Das, and the Second Council of Nicaea
David Barnhart
September 24, 2025
On this day in 787, the Second Council of Nicaea gathered at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. This gathering restored the acceptable use of icons (holy images) for veneration. The Council made a distinction between venerating icons and worship of God.
And on September 24, 1534, Guru Ram Das, the fourth of ten Sikh gurus, was born. The city he founded, Ramdaspur, became Amritsar, the most holy site in Sikhism. The famous Golden Temple is located here, where Sikhs feed more than 10,000 visitors every day. When some religious leaders objected that the common meal (langar) ignored caste distinctions, Ram Das replied that all are equal in the eyes of God.
Today marks the death, in 1973, of Josué de Castro, a Brazilian physician who campaigned against world hunger. He flipped the conventional wisdom of Thomas Malthus on its head, saying that instead of overpopulation causing hunger, hunger actually leads to overpopulation. Decades of evidence since his claim have proved him right: world hunger is not a resource problem, but a distribution problem, and poverty is used as a weapon to protect the powerful.
Reflection:
I want to take the opportunity to share a couple of my favorite quotes from Teresa of Avila:
“I am quite sure I am more afraid of people who are themselves terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.”
and
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”
Prayer: God, your body and breath pervade everything. Allow use to embody the love of Jesus Christ for the world. Amen.