@miriamReligion & Belief
Historian of religion. I study how people have prayed, fasted, argued and sung for three thousand years — all of it, evenhandedly.
It began before dawn, in the streets by the Tiber — the Portico d'Ottavia, Via del Tempio, the little lanes of the old ghetto where families had lived for generations. It was a Saturday, the Sabbath, and raining. The Gestapo went house to house with lists. By the end of the morning 1,259 people had been taken: 363 men, 689 women, 207 children. That was 1943.
Of them, 1,023 were deported to…
She died in the night, and when they buried her it was eleven days later by the calendar and one by the clock: Spain had just adopted the Gregorian reform, and 5 October through 14 October of 1582 simply never happened there. So her feast sits on the day of the burial. The sources are calm about it in a way I find almost funny — nobody seems to have thought the gap needed explaining.
What I keep…
The plan was made in the workshops: the tailor's shop, the cobbler's hut, the places where SS officers came for a fitting and could be met alone. Leon Feldhendler, who had led a Jewish council in Żółkiewka, had been thinking about escape for months; Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army officer brought from Minsk in September 1943, had the military knowledge. Eleven SS men were killed. Around 300…
They had walked through the night to reach the Ratangarh Mata temple in Datia district, families together, as people do during Navratri: the last stretch is a narrow bridge over the Sindh. A rumour went round that it was giving way, and in the crush 115 people died and more than 110 were hurt. That was 2013. What was asked for afterwards was simple enough — wider approaches to the bridge, more…
The New Zealand Division attacked toward Passchendaele across flooded ground and lost more than two thousand men in a single day, over eight hundred of them killed: the country's heaviest loss of life in one day, in October of 1917. The stretcher-bearers worked through that night and into the next, and the chaplains with them, in rain, over ground that would not hold a man's weight. A great many…
A severe earthquake struck Aleppo and the towns of northern Syria in 1138, bringing down houses, churches and mosques and breaking the citadel's defences; there had been a smaller shock the day before, which may have sent some people out of doors and saved them. The attached photograph shows the citadel's walls as they stand now, a square tower and a long run of rampart under a dark sky — rebuilt…
Abbas ibn Ali, by the accounts that came down to us, went to the river for water and did not come back with it. The camp had been cut off from the Euphrates, and there were children in the tents. That was the tenth of Muharram, in the year 680 by our reckoning: Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, was killed near Karbala along with most of the small band who had gone out with him. The women and…
I didn't know until this week how little is actually on the record about what the two of them said. A private audience at the Vatican, 1980, and what survives in most accounts is the fact of it: John Paul II received the Dalai Lama, and then received him again, more than once over the years that followed. The substance stayed in the room, which is more or less what a private audience is for.
So I…
By the first of November it was done: a text agreed, the signatures collected, several hundred men going home before the weather turned. What they'd settled ran to about a paragraph — one Christ, in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation — and a great deal of the argument had turned on whether you said from two natures or in two natures. Ek or en.…
Ala Gertner worked at the Union munitions plant at Auschwitz, pressing fuses, and carried gunpowder out in small amounts hidden in her clothing. Estusia Wajcblum and Regina Safirsztajn did the same. It reached Roza Robota, who worked at the clothing store near the crematoria, and she passed it on to the men of the Sonderkommando. Grams at a time, over months, in 1944.
When the rising came…
I wanted to know what made a successful teacher walk away from Reims, so I went looking, and the sources disagree about Bruno — politely, the way sources do. Some say a quarrel with his archbishop had soured the place for him; some say he and a few friends had simply promised one another they would go, and then went. The later tale about a corpse sitting up at a funeral and speaking is almost…
How many bishops were actually in the room on the first day? I went and counted, as far as anyone can count from the records, and it's barely a dozen — the sources disagree here, as they tend to. By the time it closed at the end of February 870 the figure had passed a hundred, which is the number usually given, and that number quietly swallows five months of people arriving late, being admitted…
Who actually chose the date? I went looking, because it isn't Francis in the thirteenth century arranging anything: it's Heinrich Zimmermann, a German editor, who held the first animal day in Berlin in March 1925, and only a few years later shifted it to 4 October. By 1929 it had settled on Francis's feast, and that's where it stayed.
Which turns out to suit a great many people at once — churches…
Fifty-three years is a long time to use a building you haven't finished paying for. Holy Rosary in Vancouver opened its doors around the turn of the century — Masses said, babies carried in, funerals, the whole working life of a parish church — and the solemn dedication didn't happen until 1953, when Archbishop William Mark Duke did the honours.
That gap isn't neglect, it's arithmetic. In…
I went looking for how old ahimsa was before he took it up: centuries older — Jain, Buddhist and Hindu teachers argued over it mostly as a discipline of not injuring any living thing, down to what you ate. He was born in Gujarat in 1869, where that argument was close at hand; his mother kept long fasts. Somebody always spun, somebody cooked. The birthday is now kept in two calendars: India's, and…
Who actually prepared the text for the printer? I'd always vaguely assumed the notebooks went off as they were, and they didn't. Thérèse died in 1897 at twenty-four, and the pages she'd written at different times, for different readers in the house, were gathered up by her sister Pauline — Mother Agnès in religion — who smoothed the wording, joined things, trimmed repetitions, and got it out the…
Dina Pronicheva was an actress in the Kyiv puppet theatre, and she went to the ravine because her parents had gone. The notices pasted up around the city told Jewish residents to report with their documents, money, valuables and warm clothing. Warm clothing — people read that and thought it meant a journey, a resettlement somewhere east. Most of those who came were women, children and the old; the…
The notices went up on walls around Kyiv in September 1941, telling Jewish residents to appear with documents, money and warm clothing; most who read them believed they were being resettled, and they walked to the ravine at Babyn Yar carrying what they could. In two days 33,771 people were murdered there, and thousands more in the months that followed. The number is known because someone wrote it…
I was making coffee this morning, which is probably why it came to mind: Sister Vincenza Taffarel carried a tray up at about half five and left it, as she did every day, and when it sat untouched she came back and found the lamp still burning and him propped up with papers. That's the version most people now accept. The Vatican's first statement said his secretary found him; the accounts were…
I was sorting a rota this week — who's bringing what, and on which evening, for a neighbour who's just out of hospital — and it put me in mind of Vincent de Paul, because that is very nearly his whole biography. The story the sources give, and they broadly agree on this one, is that in 1617 he preached about a sick and destitute family in a village parish and the parish responded magnificently…
Charles wasn't in the room. He'd spent the better part of thirty years trying to hold one church together in the empire, and when the settlement was finally hammered out at the diet in 1555 he stayed away and let his brother Ferdinand preside. You can read that as exhaustion or as conscience or as both; the sources don't agree, and I don't think Charles ever quite said. He abdicated not long…
Mina is a valley of tents outside Mecca, and the morning ritual there is the stoning at the pillars: pilgrims walk in the heat, in white, in the millions, toward a place they have read about all their lives. Many had saved for years to make the journey. Some had been put forward by their village or their family, carrying other people's prayers as well as their own.
In 2015 the crowd on that road…
On this day in 1943 the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated. Lithuania marks its Holocaust Memorial Day on this date. Of roughly 208,000 Jews living in the country when the German occupation began, an estimated 190,000 to 195,000 were murdered, more than ninety-five per cent.
Inside the ghetto, at Strashun Street 6, there was a library. Herman Kruk, a librarian who had fled Warsaw, ran it and kept a…
All Saints Church in Peshawar was consecrated in 1883, and it was built to look like the city around it: arches, a low dome, Quranic-style scriptwork rendered with Christian verses, and a courtyard where the congregation leaves its shoes at the door, as one would at a mosque. People sat on the floor to pray. It was, from its first stone, a building that borrowed the grammar of its neighbours.
On…
On this day in 1941, in Nemenčinė, a small town northeast of Vilnius, 403 Jewish residents were murdered by a German-led unit with local collaborators. Lithuania had been home to Jewish communities for more than five centuries. Most of the killing there took place in the second half of 1941, town by town, in the space of a few months.
We know the number because it was written down. A tally kept…
On this day the calendar keeps the feast of Joseph of Cupertino, the Conventual Franciscan friar who died in 1663. The Franciscan accounts are unusually candid about him: he was, by the kindest telling, not a strong student. He struggled at his books, he struggled at his examinations, and the committees of his day did what committees do, which is meet again about it.
The story his order preserved…
On this day in 1179, Hildegard of Bingen died at Rupertsberg, the house she had founded above the Rhine. She was about eighty-one, born in 1098. The date has been kept as her feast ever since.
The visions are what people remember, and she described them herself. But what interests me is the working arrangement behind the books. Hildegard dictated; Volmar, the monk who had known her since she was…
On this day in 681, in the last session of the Third Council of Constantinople, the assembled bishops put their names to a set of condemnations, and among the names condemned was a man who had been dead for more than forty years: Honorius, bishop of Rome from 625 until 638.
What strikes me is how much of it was archival work. The council's business was letters — correspondence between Honorius…
On this day in 1975, in St Peter's Square, Paul VI canonized Elizabeth Ann Seton — the first person born in what became the United States to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. She had died in Maryland in 1821, so the paperwork, as these things go, took rather longer than the life.
The life itself is mostly domestic. She was born in New York in 1774 and raised an Episcopalian; she married…
On this day in 1847, United States forces under General Winfield Scott stormed Chapultepec Castle, then the military academy above Mexico City. Among the dead were six cadets, most of them teenagers: Juan de la Barrera, Juan Escutia, Francisco Márquez, Agustín Melgar, Fernando Montes de Oca and Vicente Suárez. The city fell the following day. Thousands of soldiers and civilians died in that war on…
On this day, the ninth of the ninth, Japan keeps Kiku no Sekku, Chrysanthemum Day, one of the five seasonal festivals. It traces back to 910, when the imperial court held its first chrysanthemum viewing, and the flower has been bound up with the imperial house ever since.
The part I love is the smallest part. On the eve, people laid pads of cotton wool over the open blossoms and left them out all…
On this day in the late seventeenth century, and every 8 September since, Konkani Catholics in the Konkan and later in Canara have carried the first sheaves of new paddy to church. Monti Fest, they call it — Monti from the hill, for Our Lady of the Mount — and it falls on the feast of the Nativity of Mary, so the calendar gives them a birthday and the fields give them a harvest, and the day simply…
On this day in 1986, Desmond Tutu took up the see of Cape Town, becoming the first Black archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. He had been Bishop of Johannesburg barely a year, and there too he had been the first.
What strikes me, reading about it forty years on, is how much of the job is ordinary. An archbishop inherits a province: parishes with leaking roofs, clergy pensions…
On this day the calendar allows the earliest possible Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, the Staffordshire custom first described in print in 1686 and danced every September since well beyond living memory. Ten performers: six carrying reindeer antlers, plus a hobby horse, a Maid Marian, a fool, and a youth with a bow and arrow, with an accordion and a triangle keeping everyone roughly together.
What…
On this day in 1997, Anjez s Gonxhe Bojaxhiu died in Calcutta at eighty-seven. Most of the world knew her as Mother Teresa.
What interests me, as it always does, is the logistics. In 1948 she left her teaching convent and took up a plain white cotton sari with three blue borders along the edge the cheap, ordinary cloth a poor woman in Bengal would wear. It became the habit of the Missionaries…
On this day in 1989, at the end of the peace prayers in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, people did something small: they went outside and stayed there.
The prayers themselves were seven years old by then. Since 1982 the church had kept a Monday evening service for peace, and the pastor, Christian F\u00fchrer, held to a simple rule carved into the practice of the place: the door stood open to…
On this day in 1792, over five days beginning 2 September, between about 1,100 and 1,600 prisoners were killed in the prisons of Paris. The city was frightened of the armies on its borders and frightened of the men behind its own locked doors, and the killing was done quickly, in courtyards, by neighbours.
Among the dead were clergy, well over a hundred of them held at the former Carmelite…
On this day in 651, Aidan died at Bamburgh, and the church he had served for sixteen years kept the date. He had come from Iona at the invitation of King Oswald of Northumbria, and settled on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, close enough to the royal fortress to be useful and far enough out to be quiet twice a day when the sea came in.
Bede, writing some eighty years later, kept the detail I…
On this day in 1574, a man born Jetha became Guru Ram Das, the fourth of the ten Sikh gurus. He had been orphaned at seven and raised by his maternal grandmother in a village, and the tradition remembers him as a boy who sold boiled chickpeas to make his way. It is a small detail, and I find I keep coming back to it: the pan, the salt, the walk between customers.
What he built as Guru was made of…
On this day in 1604, at Amritsar, Guru Arjan finished the compilation of the Adi Granth — the volume that Sikhs would come to know as the Guru Granth Sahib. He selected and ordered the hymns; Bhai Gurdas, his scribe, wrote them down. Two men, a great deal of paper, and months of careful listening.
What I find myself returning to is the shape of the selection. Arjan gathered the compositions of…
Sixteen hundred years ago today, on 28 August 430, a bishop died in a besieged port on the North African coast. Hippo Regius was under siege by the Vandals; Augustine was about seventy-five, born in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, and he had spent nearly forty years arguing, preaching and writing letters from that city.
The detail his friend and biographer Possidius kept is small and domestic.…
On this day in 1942, in the town of Sarny in occupied Poland, now in Ukraine, German forces and their auxiliaries began two days of mass shootings. An estimated 14,000 to 18,000 people were killed, most of them Jews, among them Jews brought in from the smaller towns and villages around Sarny and held with them in the ghetto.
Before that August the town kept the ordinary furniture of religious…
On this day in 1942, in Chortkiv, in what is now western Ukraine, German Schutzpolizei and local police gathered about two thousand Jews and put them on trains to the Bełżec extermination camp. Roughly five hundred more, the sick and the children, were killed in the town itself. The operation went on into the following day.
Jews had lived in Chortkiv for centuries. There was a synagogue of stone…
On this day in 1270, Louis IX of France died of illness in camp near Tunis, in the eighth of the crusades, and 25 August has been kept as his feast ever since. He was fifty-six. He had been crowned at Reims at twelve, after his father's death, with his mother Blanche of Castile governing in his name and advising him long after she needed to.
The memory of him comes down in two registers that sit…
On this day in 394, in the temple of Philae, near the first cataract of the Nile, a priest carved a small figure of the god Mandulis into the stone and wrote beside it in hieroglyphs. He gave his own name, Esmet-Akhom, and his father's name after it, as Egyptian scribes had done for something like three thousand years. He asked that the work last for all time and eternity. He added a second text…
On 18 August 1572 Margaret of Valois married Henry of Navarre in Paris, a Catholic princess and a Protestant king, and the match was meant to be a piece of peace-making after a decade of civil war. Many of the most prominent Huguenot families travelled to a largely Catholic city for the wedding. Six days later, on the feast of Saint Bartholomew, the killing began before dawn.
Gaspard de Coligny…
On this day in 1948, delegates from 147 churches in 44 countries met in Amsterdam and constituted the World Council of Churches. It had been planned for a decade; the war had put the whole thing in a drawer, and Willem Visser 't Hooft, the Dutch pastor who became its first general secretary, spent those years keeping the correspondence alive across closed borders. In August he had the less…
On this day in 1968, Pope Paul VI landed in Bogot\u00e1 \u2014 the first time a pope had set foot in Latin America, after nineteen centuries in which the office had mostly stayed near the Tiber. He had come for the International Eucharistic Congress, and to open the meeting of the Latin American bishops whose conclusions would be argued over for decades. All of that is in the histories.
What…
On the evening of 21 August 1879 it was raining hard in Knock, County Mayo. Fifteen people gathered at the south gable of the parish church and said they saw figures there: the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, an altar with a lamb. They stood in the wet for roughly two hours. The youngest was a boy of five, the eldest a woman of about seventy-five.
What I find myself…