May 8, 1373: English mystic Julian of Norwich receives 15 revelations (she received another the following day) in which she saw, among other things, the Trinity and the sufferings of Christ. She recorded her visions and her meditations on them 20 years later in her book The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (see issue 30: Woman in the Medieval Church).
May 8, 1559: The Act of Uniformity receives Queen Elizabeth I's royal assent, reinstating the forms of worship Henry VIII had ordered and mandating the use of the Book of Common Prayer (1552).
May 8, 1603: The University of Leiden appoints Jacob Arminius, Dutch founder of an anti-Calvinist Reformed theology, professor of theology.
May 8, 1828: Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and the Young Men's Christian Association, is born in Geneva. He won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
May 8, 1845: The Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest denominations in America, organizes in Augusta, Georgia.
May 8, 1895: Roman Catholic archbishop and broadcaster Fulton J. Sheen is born in El Paso, Illinois. With his ABC shows "Life is Worth Living" and the "Bishop Sheen Program," he became the most prominent American Catholic of broadcasting's golden era.
May 8, 1915: Henry McNeal Turner, the first black army chaplain in the United States, dies in Windsor, Ontario, embittered toward America for its racism. Many consider him to be the precursor of black theology for his statement, "God is a Negro.”
