The Current Week in 2012:

February 5, 1597: Twenty-six Japanese Christians are crucified for their faith in Nagasaki, Japan. By 1640, thousands of Japanese Christians had been martyred.

February 5, 1631: English clergyman Roger Williams arrives in America. After questioning Massachusetts' fusion of church and state, he was banished. He bought land from native Americans and founded Rhode Island, where he established America's first Baptist church in America. His writings on religious liberty were greatly influential in securing that freedom later in America.

February 5, 1736: Methodism cofounders and brothers John and Charles Wesley arrive in Savannah, Georgia. They were to be missionaries to the native Americans, and John was to be pastor of the Savannah parish. Their efforts failed. "I went to America to convert the Indians; but O! who shall convert me?" he asked two years later (see issue 2: John Wesley and issue 69: Charles & John Wesley).

February 5, 1837: Dwight Lyman (D.L.) Moody, the greatest evangelist of his day and one of the greatest revivalists of all time, is born in Northfield, Massachusetts. Speaking to 10,000 or 20,000 at a time, he presented his message, by voice or pen, to at least 100 million people (see issue 25: D.L. Moody).

February 5, 1864: Having already established herself as a poet, 44-year-old Fanny Crosby pens her first hymn. She went on to write 8,000 more before her death 50 years later.

February 6, 891: Photius, patriarch of Constantinople from 858-867, dies after a series of excommunications and restorations. His 867 encyclical, which denounced the presence of Latin missionaries in Bulgaria as an intrusion and objected to the filioque clause in the creed ("the Holy Ghost . . . who proceeds from the Father and the Son"), was significant in the East-West conflict that eventually led to the "Great Schism" (see issue 54: Eastery Orthodoxy).

February 6, 1564: Carried to church in a chair, John Calvin preaches his last sermon three months before his death (see issue 12: John Calvin).

February 6, 1820: Eighty-six free black colonists sail from New York to Sierra Leone, Africa. Though white abolitionists initially supported such emigration efforts, most free blacks (and eventually more radical white abolitionists) denounced the effort as racist and ultimately proslavery (see issue 62: Bound For Canaan).

February 7, 1478: Thomas More, lord chancellor of England during the English Reformation, is born. Though he idealized freedom of religion in Utopia (1516), he supported the punishment of heretics and Protestants like Martin Luther and William Tyndale. He retired from office rather than acknowledge Henry VIII's divorce and was beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry as head of the church (see issue 16: William Tyndale).

February 7, 1817 (traditional date): Abolitionist Frederick Douglass is born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland. After escaping to freedom, he became the most prominent of the black abolitionists and eventually became the first black to hold high political office, as consul-general to the Republic of Haiti (see issue 62: Bound For Canaan).

February 7, 1938: After years of being closely watched by Nazi secret police, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller is put on trial. He was subsequently confined in a concentration camp, but he survived and went on to hold a leadership role in the World Council of Churches from 1948-1968 (see issue 32: Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

February 8, 356: For the third time since the Council of Nicea in 325, Athanasius goes into exile. The defender of orthodoxy was out of favor as Arianism, a heresy condemned at the council, ran rampant throughout the Empire. He would be exiled twice more before he died (see issue 51: Heresy in the Early Church).

February 8, 1587: Mary, Queen of Scots, is beheaded. Attempting to restore Catholicism to England, she began persecuting Protestants. But, largely thanks to the work of John Knox, her attempts failed (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer and issue 46: John Knox)

February 8, 1693: The College of William and Mary is founded in Williamsburg, Virginia. Originally intended to educate Anglican clergymen, it is America's second-oldest higher education institution (Harvard is the oldest).

February 9, 249 (traditional date): According to Dionysius (died c. 264), bishop of Alexandria, on this date, Roman officials "seized that marvelous aged virgin Apolloinia, broke out all her teeth with blows on her jaws, and piling up a bonfire before the city, threatened to burn her alive if she refused to recite with them their blasphemous sayings. But she asked for a brief delay and without flinching leapt into the fire and was consumed" (see issue 27: Persecution in the Early Church).

February 9, 1881: Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky dies. A devout Russian Orthodox Christian, the author of Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) once wrote "If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

February 10, 60 (traditional date): The Apostle Paul is shipwrecked at Malta (see issue 47: Apostle Paul and His Times).

February 10, 1535: A dozen Anabaptists run stark naked through the streets of Amsterdam. Such strange actions, usually by Melchoirite Anabaptists, led to the group's ridicule by Protestants and Catholics alike. Former Catholic priest Menno Simons (1496?-1561) was finally able to bring the group into a nonresistant, discipled, and disciplined vision (see issue 5: Anabaptists).

February 10, 1751: John Wesley suffers a fall on the ice-covered London Bridge and is carried to the home of Mary Vazeille, a sailor's widow. Within a week, the two were married—with disastrous results. The unhappy couple spent so little time together that, in 1771, Wesley recorded this in his journal: "I came to London and was informed that my wife died on Monday. This evening she was buried, though I was not informed of it" (see issue 2: Wesley and issue 69: Charles & John Wesley).

February 11, 1790: The Society of Friends (Quakers) presents a petition to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery.

February 11, 1858: Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant from Lourdes, France, experiences her first vision of the Virgin Mary. By July she had 18 similar visions.

February 11, 1929: The Lateran Treaty is signed by Mussolini and the Holy See, recognizing Vatican City as a sovereign state. At a mere 109 acres, it became the smallest nation in the world.

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