The Current Week in 2009:

November 1, 451: The Council of Chalcedon (in modern Turkey) adjourns. The fourth and largest of all the ancient councils, attended by between 500 and 600 bishops, it repudiated the Eutychian heresy (that Christ has one nature, not two) and drew up a Christological statement of faith now known as the Definition of Chalcedon (see issue 51: Heresy in the Early Church).

November 1, 1512: After four years of work, Michelangelo Buonarroti unveils his 5,800-square-foot painting on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.

November 1, 1776: Spanish Franciscan missionaries found San Juan Capistrano Mission in California, one of 21 missions founded in the region between 1769 and 1823 (see issue 35: Christopher Columbus).

November 1, 1950: Pope Pius XII releases his "Munificentissimus Deus," proclaiming the "Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary." The doctrine teaches that Mary was taken in body and soul into heaven at the end of her life. The belief was first propounded in Christian circles by Gregory of Tours in the late 500s.

November 2, 1164: Thomas a Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, leaves for France for a six-year exile after being condemned in royal court for "ingratitude" toward England's Henry II, who had once been his dear friend.

November 2, 1533: Harried by Catholic authorities, John Calvin flees Paris by lowering himself out a window with a bedsheet rope and disguising himself as a farmer, complete with a hoe over his shoulder. He spent three years as a fugitive before settling in Geneva (see issue 12: John Calvin).

November 3, 753 (traditional date): Pirminius, the first Abbot of Reichenau (Germany) dies. His pastoral instruction book, Scarapsus, contains the earliest evidence for the present form of the Apostles' Creed.

November 3, 1534: The British Parliament passes the Supremacy Act, officially making England Protestant and putting the English monarch at the head of the nation's church (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).

November 3, 1600: Richard Hooker, an Anglican rector whose book Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is a classic on the relationship between church and state, dies in England.

November 3, 1966: John Lennon tells reporters that his band, the Beatles, is "more popular than Jesus," touching off a firestorm of controversy.

November 4, 1646: The Massachusetts Bay Colony makes it a capital offense to deny that the Bible is the Word of God.

November 4, 1740: English clergyman Augustus Toplady, author of the hymn "Rock of Ages," is born.

November 4, 1958: Angelo Roncalli becomes Pope John XXIII. Though his papacy was expected to be uneventful, his convening of the Second Vatican Council and his changing of the church's attitudes toward non-Catholics were milestones for Roman Catholics.

November 5, 1414: The Council of Constance opens to end the Great Schism. It deposed all three rival popes, but it also executed Bohemian reformers Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, and anathematized the teachings of John Wycliffe (see issue 68: Jan Hus).

November 6, 1315: Poet Dante Alighieri is sentenced to death, in absentia, by the magistrates of Florence. Dante, who was at the time working on his Comedy in Venice, avoided the penalty by never returning to Florence, from which he had been exiled for political reasons (see issue 70: Dante Alighieri).

November 6, 1935: American revivalist Billy Sunday, a baseball player who became one of America's most famous evangelists before Billy Graham, dies at age 73. More than 100 million people heard him speak at his evangelistic crusades, and about 300,000 of them became Christians.

November 7, 739 (traditional date): Willibrord, a missionary monk who was trained in Ireland and traveled over northwestern Europe, dies. Called the "Apostle of Frisia," he was highly instrumental in the conversions of Germany and Scandinavia (see issue 63: Conversion of the Vikings).

November 7, 1637: Anne Hutchinson is convicted of spreading heresy and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her idea that believers are so united with the Holy Spirit that human categories (like moral law) are irrelevant, and her claim of direct revelation from the Holy Spirit rather than Scripture, caused many of her supporters (including influential minister John Cotton) to back off. Hutchinson was later killed in New York in an American Indian raid (see issue 41: The American Puritans).

November 7, 1837: Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois. A newspaper editor whose press was destroyed by vandals three times, he was accused of inciting slaves to revolt when he defended a black man burned at the stake by a mob. When another mob tried to burn down his warehouse, Lovejoy was shot trying to save it. His death helped to galvanize the abolitionist movement (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).

November 7, 1918: Evangelist William ("Billy") Franklin Graham, Jr., is born in Charlotte, North Carolina (see issue 65: The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century).

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