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Quote of the day

“What do I care whether you live in one room or six I want to know what your spirit is doing. What are you thinking, feeling, and reading ... My task h...”

Beach, Seth Curtis. Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Brief Biographies. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries, Inc., 1905, 1967.

Devotional

He Who Would Win Souls Must First Get Virtue

For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in...

Events

669

Theodore of Tarsus arrives in Canterbury to serve as Archbishop. He will visit the whole of England, establishing the Roman date for Easter and settling bishops in all the sees except London.

Authority for the date: Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church.

1084

Robert Guiscard, a Norman adventurer, enters Rome at the request of Pope Gregory VII. He liberates the pope and reduces half the city to ruins. His men will rape even the nuns and sell thousands of Romans into slavery.

Authority for the date: Schaff, Philip. History of the Christian Church.

1096

Archbishop Ruthard hides 1,300 Jews from anti-Semitic mobs, but the rioters find and massacre all but a handful.

Authority for the date: Durant, Will. The Age of Faith. (Story of Civilization.)

1341

A council of bishops in Constantinople declares heretical the views of Eastern Orthodox theologian Barlaam the Calabrian. Barlaam and his supporters had argued against the hesychast method of prayer and against the theological teaching that the light at the transfiguration and the fire in the burning bush were examples of the uncreated energies of God. After his condemnation, Barlaam will become a Roman Catholic.

Authority for the date: http://orthodoxwiki.org/Barlaam_of_Calabria

1549

Anabaptist Elizabeth Dirks is drowned in a bag in the Netherlands. Her Catholic captors, in an attempt to get her to betray the name of the person who baptized her, had tortured her with thumbscrews until blood spurted from under her fingernails, and crushed her legs in screws until she fainted from agony. (Her death is sometimes, mistakenly, said to have been on 27 March.)

Authority for the date: Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

1564

Death at Geneva of John Calvin, reformer and theologian.

Authority for the date: Christian History 12 (1986).

1661

Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyle, is beheaded at Edinburgh on accusations of treason because of his involvement with the Scottish Covenanters.

Authority for the date: Dryerre, J. Meldrum. Heroes and Heroines of the Scottish Covenanters. London: S.W. Partridge, 1896.

1702

Death at Clermont of Jesuit author Dominique Bouhours, best known for biographies of Loyola and Xavier.

Authority for the date: Catholic Encyclopedia

1828

Lyman Beecher and former opponents of Charles Finney’s revival methods publish a letter saying that the general interests of religion will not be served by continued controversy on the subject. Finney is among the signatories of the letter.

Authority for the date: Wright, G. Frederick. Charles Grandison Finney. 

1831

Christian explorer Jedediah Smith is surrounded and killed by Comanche Indians at a water hole near the Cimarron River.

Authority for the date: Katz, Bob. “Mountain Man Jedidiah Smith Was a Desert Man, Too.”

1944

Billy Graham gets his start in big-city evangelism at a Youth for Christ rally at Orchestra Hall in Chicago ten days before D-Day.

Authority for the date: Wacker, Grant. “Watershed: Los Angeles 1949.” Christian History (2014).

1948

Death in Atlanta, Georgia, of Luther B. Bridgers, author of the hymn “There’s Within My Heart a Melody.“

Authority for the date: Cyberhymnal.

1969

Xu Chenping becomes the Catholic bishop of Hong Kong where he will seek to implement the instructions of Vatican II.

Authority for the date: Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity.

2001

Authorities beat to death Yu Zhongju, a twenty-seven-year-old Christian woman, in China’s Hubei Province merely because she happens to be present when they arrest another Christian. Before her death, she is sexually abused, tortured with electricity, and burned with cigarette butts along with other Christian women.

Authority for the date: Paul Hattaway, China’s Christian Martyrs. p. 483

2007

Abune Dioskoros, the fourth patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewhado Church is installed. His predecessor, Abune Antonios, is under house arrest at the time for criticizing the government for interfering in church activities and for persecuting evangelical Christians.

Authority for the date: HCJB Global.

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